Social Justice Books

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

Six of Crows

Reviewed by Natasha Razi Review Source: Disability in Kid Lit Book Author: At its heart, Six of Crows is a classic heist story: a group of interesting, messed-up people facing a seemingly impossible crime — in this case, breaking a prisoner out of a high-security prison. Within this framework, Bardugo weaves together five points of view, […]

The Stars Beneath Our Feet

Reviewed by Megan Schliesman Review Source: Reading While White Book Author: Offering hope, acknowledging hardship. Debut author David Barclay Moore writes with open eyes about the challenges of Lolly’s life as a Black boy in a poor neighborhood on the cusp of young adulthood, and with eyes just as wide he shows the many things Lolly […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]