Social Justice Books

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

Kapaemahu

Reviewed by Brad Manker Review Source: Teaching for Change Book Author:  Kapaemahu is a centuries-old traditional Hawaiian story (mo’olelo) based on “The Healer Stones of Kapaemahu,” first published in 1907. The legend tells of four extraordinary Tahitians who traveled to the island of Oahu and taught local people the art of healing. The tall, gentle visitors […]

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 […]

Fatima’s Great Outdoors

Reviewed by Paige Pagan Review Source: Teaching for Change Book Author: Fatima is having a hard time adjusting to her new life in the United States and is looking forward to camping, what her Papa calls “a great American pastime,” (p. 2) as a means of escaping from the bullying and isolation she experiences in her […]

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 […]