Reviewed by Paige Pagan Review Source: Teaching for Change Book Author: Ophie’s Ghosts, winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, is a beautifully tender middle grade novel set in the 1920s about the complexity of grief and its lingering effects on both the living and the dead. Author Justina Ireland offers a thought-provoking message […]
Three Strike Summer
Reviewed by Betsy Bird Review Source: School Library Journal Book Author: The gutsy girl is a conundrum in children’s books. She seems so easy to conjure up. Writing a bit of historical fiction? Surely all you have to do is just give your heroine some feisty comebacks and historically accurate inequities and the audience will be […]
Jazz Owls: A Novel of the Zoot Suit Riots
Reviewed by Rethinking Schools Review Source: Rethinking Schools Book Author: Every 20th-century U.S. history class covers World War II. However, the 1943 attack by white sailors on Mexican Americans, Filipinos, and African Americans in Los Angeles, known as the Zoot Suit Riots, gets little mention. Author Margarita Engle uses free verse to bring this history […]
Ellen’s Broom
Reviewed by Deborah Miller Review Source: Teaching for Change Book Author: Ellen’s Broom is a sweet yet powerful story about a young girl who learns the significance of a so-called broom wedding. Slavery has ended and Reconstruction just begun. This means that the marriages of formerly enslaved people, like Ellen’s parents, can be formally recognized […]
The Parker Inheritance
Reviewed by Edith Campbell Review Source: Cotton Quilts Book Author: Candace Miller, a young African American girl, and her mother move into the home that once belonged to her grandmother while their own home is being renovated. Her parents have divorce and they need to prepare the house for sale. This temporary residence is in […]
Bronze and Sunflower
Reviewed by: Lyn Miller-Lachmann Review Source: The Pirate Tree Book Author: Seven-year-old Sunflower is the daughter of an artist forcibly relocated from the city to the countryside during China’s cultural revolution. By day, he works in the “Cadre School,” leaving the young child to explore the river and nearby village of Damaidi. There she sees […]