Social Justice Books

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

Before We Were Free

Reviewed by Cindy L. Rodriguez Review Source: Latinxs in Kid Lit Book Author: Anyone who has read Julia Alvarez’s adult novels will enjoy the connections made in Before We Were Free to How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies. In Before We Were Free, Alvarez explores the Trujillo […]

Heroes of the Environment

Reviewed by Lila Quintero Weaver Review Source: Latinxs in Kids Lit Book Author: This nonfiction book for grades 4 and up celebrates the environmental triumphs achieved by a dozen unsung heroes of all ages located in various parts of the United States and Mexico. I’m giving it star billing because I feel it deserves wider attention. […]

Juan Pablo and the Butterflies

Reviewed by Beverly Slapin Review Source: De Colores Book Author: Unfortunately, Juan Pablo & the Butterflies is littered with, among other things, highly unlikely events; each signaled by the arrival of a butterfly, who guides JP, showing him where to go and what to do. (The butterflies, of course, embody the spirit of JP’s abuela, now residing with […]

The First Rule of Punk

Reviewed by Lettycia Terrones Review Source: Latinos in Kid Lit Book Author: There is a scene half-way through Celia C. Pérez’s brilliant middle-grade novel The First Rule of Punk that pulls so powerfully at the heartstrings of all those who have ever struggled with forming their identity as a minoritized person in the U.S. Having just wrapped up […]

Crossing Ebenezer Creek

Reviewed by Deborah Menkart Review Source: Rethinking Schools Book Author: This is an extraordinary book of historical fiction about the December 9, 1864 Massacre at Ebenezer Creek, where, on the march to Savannah, thousands of African American families who had just escaped from slavery were left to drown by Sherman’s Army. The protagonist of the book […]

Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library

Reviewed by Deborah Menkart Review Source: Teaching for Change Book Author: “Where is our historian to give us our side? To teach our people our own history?” asks Afro-Puerto Rican Arturo Schomburg on the first page of this beautifully illustrated picture book. Schomburg’s 5th-grade teacher had told him “Africa’s sons and daughters had no history, […]