Jawanza is not allowed to leave his apartment building and play on the busy street. He spends a lot of time at the window, watching the people below and the pigeons that flock around his building. That’s how he meets Roderick Jackson Montgomery the Three. The older man raises pigeons on the roof of Jawanza’s building. Soon Jawanza is on the rooftop, too, trying to decipher the language of the birds and the ways of Roderick Jackson Montgomery the Three, who is gruff and friendly, mysterious and forthright, touched and wholly sane all at once. “Boy, if you don’t listen you won’t learn nothing. God gave you two ears and only one mouth, because he wants you to listen more than you talk!” In this soaring, poetic story, Christopher Myers has written about a lonely African American boy who finds friendship — and freedom — on the unlikely confines of an urban rooftop. Myers’s exquisite artwork is full of color and motion in this beautifully designed volume. (Ages 8–11)