Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson
Published: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, 2015
Pages: 32
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Sometimes we like a book because we’re supposed to. Media that checks all the boxes of things we want to see more of tends to draw enthusiastic backers even if the content doesn’t have much beyond those boxes to recommend it. I felt like that recently while slogging my way through multiple award winner Hello, Universe and I had the same feeling reading Last Stop on Market Street.
Much like Hello, Universe, very little actually happens. A grandmother takes her inquisitive son on a bleak bus ride through a rundown neighborhood and encourages him to see beauty in their surroundings. They go to work in a soup kitchen and observe a series of diverse urban characters along the way. Peña includes disabled neighbors, homeless neighbors, tattooed neighbors and happy smiles on a rainbow of complexions, but our introduction to each person is only skin deep.
Grandson CJ marvels at his nana’s ability to see beauty in the little things and 
environments he describes as “dirty,” and the reader may marvel at the same because the flat, grungy artwork has no details to admire. Robinson’s trendy style is simplistic by intention but it isn’t complex enough to support a story that isn’t really there. Without much going on, the art takes center stage, and so does CJ’s magically expanding and contracting neck size.
This book’s dual Caldecott and Newbury was controversial in 2016, with only one prior Newbury win for a picture book in 1982. Art is subjective and the bold pictures have a number of standout moments, particularly the tattooed man on the bus and the close-up shot of the grandmother and CJ in the rain. The colloquial language sounds like things a real child might say and it’s nice to see a wide variety of people on the street, but with so many excellent chapter books out in the same year, it’s hard to compare them to a collection of slow, contemplative scenes without a clear beginning or end.
My daughter checked this book out from the school library and I decided to end this review by finding out why. She held up the cover, pointed to the two award stickers and said, “Because it has these!” Mystery solved.