The Hickory Chair
"I loved Gran's smell, and her warm face when we played touch-your-nose  at the gold mirror, and her salty kisses when we sat on Gramps's old army trunk  in the attic and listened to the wind sing on the roof."Blind since birth, Louis uses all his senses to love his grandmother and feel  her love for him. When she dies and Louis seems to have been forgotten in the  family treasure hunt Gran arranged in lieu of a will, he must hold on to his  knowledge of her love for him and his memories of her smell--"lilacs, with a  whiff of bleach"--and her "molasses voice" to know he could never have been  overlooked. It is a lifetime later, when Louis is a grandfather himself, that  his conviction is affirmed by his "favorite youngest grandchild's" discovery in  Gran's much-loved hickory chair.Nothing is overdone in Lisa Rowe Fraustino's beautiful story that shows the  profound power of "blind sight," Gran's term for Louis's ability to "see" so  much. And the exquisite paintings, in oils and fabric collage by artist Benny  Andrews (Sky Sash So  Blue) have a tactile appeal, drawing in the reader to Louis's world, as  though we are seeing the way he does. (Ages 6 to 10)--Emilie Coulter