Social Justice Books

Critically reviewed selection of multicultural and social justice books for children, young adults, and educators.

Drama: A Graphic Novel

Reviewed by Michelle Ann Abate Review Source:  Children’s Literature in Education Book Author: “Springtime in the South is Like a Song in My Heart”: Raina Telgemeier’s Drama, the Romanticization of the Plantation South, and the Romance Plot Abstract This essay explores the complex relationship that exists between the romance plot and the romanticization of the antebellum […]

This Is My America

Reviewed by Keesha Ceran Review Source: Teaching for Change Book Author: Kim Johnson’s This is My America is a beautiful book following the story of the Beaumont family and the protagonist, Tracy Beaumont. Tracy has made it her mission to help her father, an innocent Black man on death row, who as this book begins, […]

Our Missing Hearts

Reviewed by Renée H. Shea Review Source: Poets & Writers Book Author: Ravenous With Story: A Profile of Celeste Ng “Stranger than fiction” seems meaningless during a time — our time, now — when the unimaginable is a daily reality. Yet in her new novel, Our Missing Hearts, published in October by Penguin Press, Celeste Ng […]

Forever Cousins

Reviewed by Debbie Reese Review Source: American Indians in Children’s Literature Book Author: As I turned the pages of Forever Cousins, I thought back to the early 1990s when we left Nambé’s reservation to go to graduate school in Illinois. Our daughter was three years old. She and her cousins were in tears. The always-present playing options […]

Evicted! The Struggle for the Right to Vote

Reviewed by Rethinking Schools Book Author: African American sharecroppers in Fayette County, Tennessee, tried to exercise their legal right to register to vote in the late 1950s. A key motivation was to break the practice of all-white juries which denied African Americans a fair trial. The white backlash was brutal. Black people who attempted to register […]

The Lost Dreamer

Reviewed by Cris Rhodes Review Source: Latinx in Kid Lit Book Author: MY TWO CENTS: From the very first sentences, when Indir is awoken, afraid and disoriented, by the trumpeting of a conch shell, The Lost Dreamer, Lizz Huerta’s stunning debut, pulls readers into the dreamy and rich world of a magical, uncolonized Central America. Indir holds […]