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We never had quite enough, but we made it work. … I saw my mom hustle, do every different job she could to provide for us. “My big takeaway from my childhood was: I saw my dad get up every day, 5 o’clock in the morning. “The bread was sort of like the discipline, and the meat and the vegetables were kind of like the love, so it was balanced.”ĭe le Peña grew up in a working-class neighborhood just outside San Diego near the U.S.-Mexico border. Robinson identified with that sentiment but says his grandmother was a little less “polite and gentle” in her efforts to help him recognize the blessings in front of him. “And they develop this idea of like ‘I want, I want, I want.’ … I felt like the grandmother was such a great vehicle for: ‘But you have, you have, you have.’ ” “Kids are inundated with so many advertisements of things that they ‘should’ have,” de la Peña says. It got de la Peña thinking about the way grandmothers can help shape the way children view the world and their place in it. “It kind of hit home for me because my grandmother is sort of the matriarch of my family.” “It was an illustration of a young boy on a bus with his grandmother,” de la Peña tells NPR’s David Greene. Until this project, they’d never worked together, but they did share an agent, who sent one of Robinson’s drawings to de la Peña. The book is a collaboration between writer Matt de la Peña and illustrator Christian Robinson, who grew up riding the bus in Los Angeles with his own grandmother. CJ is riding with his grandmother, Nana, and along the way, he encounters a variety of passengers - a man covered in tattoos, an elderly woman with a jar of butterflies, a blind man and his guide dog, teens listening to music. Last Stop on Market Street is a new picture book that takes children on a journey, not to an imaginary land far, far away but to a much more real place by way of a city bus.