This is the lovely story of a girl who tells of a necklace of glittering beads that has been passed down to the granddaughters in her family, including herself. Each of the women who wore it was strong and spent a precious moment with her mother on the day it was passed on to her. The author adds in her note at the end of the book her extensive search to find out more about her ancestors, including an Irish ancestress named Frances Stward who was her great-great-great grandmother and who married a free man of color after arriving in the US in 1861.

The illustrations in this book are absolutely stunning, done by one of our favorite illustrators, Bagram Ibatoulline. My son and I couldn't get over the detailed pictures so real to life they looked like photographs. We tried to select the one we liked the most but found that every one of them was awesome. My son remarked at how the illustrator brought to life each person's hair, so that one could easily see the strands, frizz, curls, and highlights in it.

The story is suited to girls, and would be a perfect one for mothers or grandmothers to read to their young girls and granddaughters. Apart from the illustrations, which he thought were amazing, my 9 year-old son couldn't quite appreciate the value of a necklace being passed down from the womenfolk through the generations. So this one is definitely a girl's book that could spark a curiosity in learning more about her ancestresses.

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