When people think of Jackie Robinson, they remember him as the first black man to play major-league baseball.
Sharon Robinson, however, has a different view of the man revered for his courage and character; he was her father. Robinson remembers his playful side and how he loved to spend time with his family.
Now she has taken one of her favorite memories of her father and made it the centerpiece of a wonderful new picture book, “Testing the Ice” ($16.99). In the book, Robinson first introduces young readers to her dad’s accomplishments on the baseball field, then details how he showed the same bravery when testing the ice on the family’s backyard pond one winter.
The Robinson family moved to a large Connecticut property when Sharon Robinson was 6 years old. In that first summer, Robinson wondered why her father didn’t join the family fun in the pond. The following winter, as she watched her father gingerly walk onto the frozen pond to make sure it was solid enough for young skaters, Robinson suddenly realized why her father had an aversion to water — he couldn’t swim.
Yet, just as on the baseball field, Jackie Robinson refused to be ruled by fear. As Sharon Robinson writes in “Testing the Ice”: “Now, years have passed, and we understand even more how much courage it took for my father to step out on that ice.
“In fact, Dad showed the same courage on the ice that day as he did when he broke the color barrier in baseball. … That was Jackie Robinson. And that was my dad.”
In a recent interview, Sharon Robinson, 59, noted that she wanted to show young readers that “my dad was not just a baseball player.
“There was a real consistency between the public person and the private person,” she said. “He really was a good person in all ways.”
Although this is her first picture book, Robinson has written several other children’s books and clearly has a sense of how to create interesting, readable books for kids.
The illustrations for “Testing the Ice” are by Kadir Nelson, an award-winning children’s-book illustrator and author. Baseball is a favorite subject for Nelson. This year, he became the first black to win the Sibert Medal — given for the best children’s nonfiction — for his book about the Negro Leagues, “We Are the Ship.”
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