Social Justice Books

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

Listen: How Evelyn Glennie, a Deaf Girl, Changed Percussion

Reviewed by Brad Manker Review Source: Teaching for Change Book Author:  If your ears can’t hear the strum, or hum, or thrum of a melody, can music still swirl and whirl? Talented Evelyn Glennie embraced music from a young age but gradually grew deaf. Her audiologist, and others around her, predicted that she would have to […]

Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?

Reviewed by Kimberly Ellis Review Source: Teaching for Change Book Author:  As Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, “Abolition is not absence; it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities.” Can We Please Give the Police Department to the Grandmothers?,  written by Junauda Petrus and illustrated by Kristen […]

Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series

Reviewed by: Debbie Reese Review Source: American Indians in Children’s Literature Book Author: A few years ago, I would do tweet reviews and sometimes, I’d use a platform (Storify) that would gather the tweets into a single document, and then I’d plop that document in a blog post. People liked that tweet-review-turned-into-blog-post a lot. But […]

Stacey Abrams: Lift Every Voice

  Reviewed by Deborah Menkart Review Source: Teaching for Change Book Author: Stacey Abrams is one of the most strategic, visionary, and dedicated political leaders of this century, so we were delighted to learn that there was a picture book for young children about her life. Sadly, the book fails to do justice to her […]

My Powerful Hair

Reviewed by Elizabeth Blair Review Source: NPR Book Author: My Powerful Hair is a new picture book that turns a painful truth about racism into a celebration of Native culture. When Carole Lindstrom was a little girl growing up in Bellevue, Nebraska, she really wanted long hair. She would put the blanket she had as a baby on […]

That Flag

Reviewed by Erin Green Review Source: Rethinking Schools Book Author: I read the powerful picture book That Flag, written by Tameka Fryer Brown, aloud to my preservice teachers last week. (Thanks to the recommendation of Social Justice Books and the Zinn Education Project.) Our class session was about how to address race and racism in elementary social studies, and this […]