You know this truth: The curl’s the thing. Short and close to your head, wound around your finger, standing tall in a pineapple, you love how your hair curls around your face, over your shoulders, and down your back. The curl’s the thing – it might even be something you’re known for – but in “Lotus Bloom and the Afro Revolution” by Sherri Winston, it’s a thing to get someone in trouble. Everything was fine before the paper airplane. Well, maybe it was more like fine-ish. On her first day at a new magnet school near Miami Beach, Lotus Bloom…
Author: Terri Schlichenmeyer
Almost every problem has a solution. Sometimes, a fix is right in front of your face, and you can make it without anybody’s help. Other times, well, another set of eyes or hands can help you find the right path, or a crisis can lead you to an “AHA!” Just remember: almost every problem has a solution, and as you’ll see in “Kid Trailblazers” by Robin Stevenson, illustrated by Allison Steinfeld, you don’t have to be an adult to figure it out. Sometimes, being a kid is frustrating. You might feel powerless, like you can’t do anything. So how does…
You’re almost out. Out of energy, ideas, motivation, totally depleted from all you’ve been doing lately. Seeing racism, acting against inequality, speaking out against it, fighting for your friends and family, it all takes a toll and when you’re just plain tired, you need something to help you focus. You need “Do the Work!” by W. Kamau Bell & Kate Schatz to energize you. So you’ve been fighting racism and, at this point, you’re simply “exhausted” over it all. This process isn’t easy and eliminating racism won’t happen overnight, but take a breath. This book is meant to help you…
Psychologists Who Changed the World’ Of course, you remember it, the weight of it in your hands, the way it fit your fingers, the envy of your peers, the pretending fun of it, and the security of knowing it would be waiting for you after school. Toys are essential in childhood, important in some adulthoods, and in the new book “What the Children Told Us” by Tim Spofford, they’re key in understanding racism and inequality. Kenneth and Mamie Clark had both grown up with the benefits that Black middle-class life bestowed on its members in the 1930s and ‘40s. Still,…
School will start soon, and you’re going to meet a lot of new kids. You’ll meet kids from other towns and maybe from other countries; some will have lighter hair and some will have darker skin. Maybe they will look like you, and maybe they won’t, so why not find out what’s different and interesting about those new kids by reading one (or all!) of these great books…. Do you know where your new classmates will live? In “My Town Mi Pueblo” by Nicholas Solis, illustrated by Luisi Uribe (Nancy Paulsen Books, $17.99) two cousins live very near one another,…
Sometimes, you just have to lay your burden down. When it’s heaviest, when your arms can’t support it and your back breaks from the weight of it, when your shoulders and your heart ache from it, release it. Let it go, let it be. Or, as in the new novel, “Our Gen” by Diane McKinney-Whetstone, ask a friend to lend a hand. Cynthia hated everything about the Sexagenarian, an over-55 complex to which she’d moved. She hated that her son and his wife had all but forced her to move there, that “The Gen” wasn’t her old house, and that…
Raise your voice in song. Let it carry to the skies, high notes above the clouds like so many birds in flight, low notes scraping the tips of the grass. Sing your happiness out loud, and let your sadness be carried softly to a better place. Raise your voice in song, even if, as in the new book “My Old Kentucky Home” by Emily Bingham, it sends someone else down. Stephen Foster was in a bad way. Unhappily married less than a year and father to a child he suspected wasn’t his, he struggled to do the right thing, by…
One hundred sixty-three. That’s how many friends you have on social media and you know most of them, one way or another. There are colleagues on your list, and cousins, friends, and a guy you don’t really remember meeting. You connected to them all somehow and you count them as friends or more. As in the new memoir, “Miss Chloe” by A.J. Verdelle, keeping in touch with them is always worth it. When her first novel was in its final stages before release, A.J. Verdelle sent out a few precious copies to trusted sources, and one of them made its…
You weren’t born knowing everything. People had to tell you what you needed to know, and that’s how you learn. You can guess sometimes, or figure other things out on your own but mostly, you’ve been told and then you know. So why not read these books about a fact that was unknown for years… When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and freed the slaves, the word was spread far and wide… except in Texas. For more than two years after the signing, there were still people in bondage there. In “Opal Lee and What It Means to Be…
A life well-lived. That’s what you want them to say when you’re gone: that you used up every shred of the time on Earth you were given, that you seized it from corner to corner and never wasted a minute. It’s an envious thing, to take advantage of your moments but in “Things Past Telling” by Sheila Williams, it’s not an easy thing, either. When she stayed silent, they thought she couldn’t hear, or was addled. But that wasn’t so. In her silence, one-hundred-twelve-year-old Maryam Priscilla Grace was remembering… As the middle child of her father’s second wife, with brothers…