On Fridays - Perfect Picture Book Friday #PPBF

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I fell in love with this touching cover immediately. This remarkable book looks at intergenerational friendships and the sudden, unexpected loss of one of those friends, through the lense of a child's first experience with death and the compassionate and caring guidance from other friends at the senior center.

Book cover - a boy, wearing a suit, holds a pink tulip to his nose against a blue sky with light wispy clouds.

On Fridays

Author: Winsome Bingham

Illustrator: Jason Griffin

Publisher: Neal Porter Books (September 1, 2026)

Ages: 4-8

Fiction

Themes:

Friendship, grief, saying goodbye, and healing.

Synopsis:

Senior citizen mentors help a boy make sense of loss in this powerful collaboration from acclaimed creators Winsome Bingham and Jason Griffin.

On Fridays after school, Jamar takes the bus to meet Momma at the assisted living center where she works. There's always someone interesting to talk to there, like Mr. Dillon, who twirls and slides through the halls; Mr. Riff, who wears a suit and plays guitar in his room; and Miss Neely, who teaches Jamar to garden. They're a community—a family.

Everything is right on Fridays. But when Momma wakes Jamar up to drive back to the center in the middle of the night, he knows something must be very wrong.

Funerals are for saying goodbye, but Jamar doesn't want to say goodbye to Miss Neely. After all, why didn't she say goodbye to him? Momma explains it wasn't by choice; that's why we have to give people their flowers while they're here.

A collaboration between acclaimed author Winsome Bingham and Caldecott Honoree Jason Griffin, On Fridays is a stirring tribute to cross-generational friendship, and a glimpse at how grief can teach us to love better. Musical text and vivid illustrations animate a close-knit cast of characters sure to remain in readers' hearts.

Opening Lines:

On Fridays after school, I ride the bus

to Momma’s job.

Momma is a therapist. She helps people

train their brains and clear their minds.

What I LOVED about this book:

I love how the opening spread of a sedate school bus heading down a road shifts on the next spread to this extremely playful and fun series of vignettes of a bus full of loud, happy, singing kids because "it's Friday, and the weekend."

Internal spread - on the left, spot images of the bus jostling above a tire with a "bump!" and a tire rising up to the bus frame with a "thump!" On the upper right, a blur of a bus with and on the lower right a bus zips along the road.

Text © Winsome Bingham, 2026. Image © Jason Griffin, 2026.

Wonderful first person lyrical text, full of internal rhyme, onomatopoeia, and personality, ("Our bodies jiggle. We giggle and scream, “Do it again!/ One more time! Do it again!/ As soon as the bus curve the corner, I see it.") combines with stunning illustrations which flow between portraits, photographs, and mixed-media collage, set against loose backgrounds, and guides us through Jamar's weekly interactions with residents at a senior center where his momma works.

His "favorites" include Miss Neely, a former florist, who tends the center's garden, filling the place with pink tulips and helps Jamar pot a special one for himself. Mr. Dillon, who always "shuffles, slides, and spins" with Jamar. And Mr. Riff, who "plays [guitar] —picking, plucking, plunking strings." I love how Winsome Bingham and Jason Griffin masterfully wove the motif of pink tulips throughout the book.

Internal spread - a older gentleman in a suit and black hat sits playing a guitar.

Text © Winsome Bingham, 2026. Image © Jason Griffin, 2026.

Mr. Riff plays—picking, plucking, plunking

strings. The tip of his toes Tap, Tap, Tap

the tiles.

His fingers strum, sliding smoothly up and

down the neck of the guitar.

Music from his lips and fingertips fills the

room like tulips fill Miss Neely’s garden.

At the end of Momma's shift, he takes his potted tulip to his room and we are treated to a spectacular dream of Jamar "flying and floating with excitement. Me, the wind, and the crown petals play dodgeball with the clouds."

Internal spread - soaring over the clouds, through a star specl=kled night, a boy rides a tulip across the moon.

Woken suddenly and rushed back to the center, where a repeat image shows an empty pot in front of a window, Jamar learns from Mr. Dillon that, “Our flower is gone to another home . . . Now she’ll be the biggest tulip in Heaven’s garden.” Gently, Mr. Riff and Mr. Dillon help Jamar process the reality and his emotions of Miss Neely's death, addressing the genuine concern of a child about not getting to say goodbye and worries about who will care for Miss Neely's garden. Jason Griffin created such a touching and whimsical image of the three of them perched on a tulip leaf, gazing up at a full moon.

Internal spread - a large tulip fills the page, as a moon shines above and two boys and a man stand on one of the leaves.

“She moved away and didn’t say goodbye?”

“Listen, Jamar,” Mr. Riff says and kneels before me, “sometimes

when you reach a certain age, you don’t get time to tell

everyone goodbye. Or how much you love them. That’s why

we are here. To say our goodbyes.”

Jamar's mamma gently continues a conversation with him concerning his reluctance to attend the memorial and him (and the readers) a very poignant thought “That’s why you give everyone their flowers while you’re with them. Because you never know when they will be moving on.” Beautifully wrapping back to the beginning, the ending is powerful and thoughtful. It is an honest and candid look at grief and goodbyes, but also a touching ode to community and found families.

Interestingly, as noted in the forward notes by the author and illustrator, this story started when Jason Griffin sent Winsome Bingham the beautiful, "mostly object-based, mood-driven pieces of tulips, guitars, and the sky" images that are on the book's case. What a treasure to find under the touching jacket cover of the book.

Book Case - 30 images with tulips, bus, ferry, buildings, houses, and the sky.

Resources:

when you look at these images on the book's case, what story would you create? Write or draw your own short story based on some of these images.
make origami tulips (easy), (medium), and (hard) and give them to special people in your life - family, teachers, friends, and coaches.

If you missed my interview with Winsome Bingham and Jason Griffin on Monday, find it (here).

This post is part of a series of blog posts by authors and KidLit bloggers called Perfect Picture Book Fridays. For more picture book suggestions and resources see Susanna Leonard Hill's Perfect Picture Books.