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15 Things Not to Do With a Baby #mixed #biracial #black #diversekidsbooks
Joining the group of successful “List” books is this title by Margaret McAllister, featuring an interracial family and focused on the older sister’s shenanigans with her new born baby sibling. Like most of the “list” stories, the appeal of this book is its humor. The script and illustrations combine in hilarity with lines like “Don’t give the baby to a kangaroo,” standing alone to make one laugh while the illustration accompanying a line as simple as “Don’t take the baby to school,” gifts the scene with humor. The opening page is a family image of mommy (who is white) and daddy (who is of African Descent), the older daughter and new baby together. There is no mention of the family being interracial and the daughter and baby carry the rest of the story with their fun antics.
Often, mixed heritage children of darker hue feel they have to constantly prove that they are mixed. This engaging title featuring dark brown biracial children serves as a positive, fun, and encouraging reflection of deep chocolate hued mixed kids on the page. This will quickly become a favorite bed time story for your child of any background, who will ask to read it over and over again.
Reviewer: Omilaju Miranda
Author: Margaret McAllister; Illustrator: Holly Sterling
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
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The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow #DiverseKidsBooks #MixedRace #biracial
Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing tells the moving story of a young black woman who decides to pass for white, and the story ends with the woman falling or being pushed out of a window to her death. Heidi Durrow has said that Larsen, who, like Durrow, is half black and half Danish, is one of her literary heroes, and the mother of the main character in Durrow’s 2011 bestseller The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is named Nella. Durrow’s Nella has a daughter, Rachel, who is half Danish and half black, and it is this girl, Rachel, whose story is related in The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. Hers is a story that offers homage to Nella Larsen’s work, as well as bears witness to an actual story that Durrow read about, a recent true story of a mother who fell, or jumped, from the top of a building while holding her children; only a daughter survived. (more…)
Mommy Far, Mommy Near – An Adoption Story by Carol A Peacock & Shawn Brownell #TransracialAdoption #BirthMother #DiverseKidsBooks
Mommy Far, Mommy Near is a story of adoption told from the perspective of the adoptee—a little girl named Elizabeth who, along with her sister, was adopted from China by a white American family. Illustrated with gently painted images with a dreamy aura, and the story that unfolds is a sort of coming-of-age narrative, as Elizabeth comes to grips with the details and repercussions of her adoption.
Although she has heard the story her whole life – her mother has a book with a silver cover that shows pictures of the process – the book gently reveals her realization that not only are she and her adoptive family of different ethnicities, but that her “mommy far” is an actual person with a family who had given her up for adoption. (more…)
Our Baby From China, An Adoption Story by Nancy D’Antonio #TransracialAdoption #WeNeedDiverseBooks #DiverseKidsBooks #WeHaveDiverseBooks
Our Baby From China, An Adoption Story is exactly that: the step-by-step story of one family’s adoption of a little Chinese girl who they named Ariela Xiangwei. Told from the perspective of the adoptive parents, the book resembles an intimate travel narrative written specifically with their adoptive daughter in mind.
Illustrated not only with photographs from the trip that the parents took in China, almost half of the book is about the famous places the D’Antonio family visits in China. It also includes a slew of more personal family photographs that seem like they would be more at home in a personal collection than in a book for children. (more…)
A Child’s Calendar by John Updike; illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman
A Caldecott Honor book, first published in 1965 then reprinted in 1999 with new illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman, A Child’s Calendar takes readers through a year’s worth of verse as a racially mixed family enjoys each month. Updike has written one poem for each month of the year. We are ushered through the seasons with sweet, simple stanzas that celebrate all the varied scenes and rituals that children—and those former children, adults—treasure over time.
Hyman’s illustrations are crowded with what appears to be a tight-knit, racially mixed family as well as a racially mixed, easygoing small-town community.
Hyman’s vision and Updike’s verse offer up a world where race matters far less than things like gathering together to share a meal, to rake leaves, or plant tomatoes. This is an ideal world of simple pleasures—a visual representation of the harmonic dream adults should hold on to and to which children should aspire to create.
Reviewer: Maggie Trapp
Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu
In Breadcrumbs, Anne Ursu has penned a lively, wistful tale that gets at so much of the poignancy that is being a 10-year-old. This is a moving story that offers a modern-day account of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” In Ursu’s version, Hazel, a ten-year-old Indian-American girl with white (adoptive) parents is best friends with Jack, the boy next door until Jack mysteriously changes. The adults around them chalk up this change to typical pre-teen turmoil: it’s not unusual for girl–boy friendships to become awkward. But the reader can feel Hazel’s sadness. It’s hard to grow up, it’s hard to change and watch others change. Hazel is caught between wanting to fit in and wanting to keep her special friendship with Jack the way it is. At its heart, this is a story about how we can hold onto our real selves even as we change along with our friends. (more…)
Jasmine Skies by Sita Brahmachari
When I heard Sita Brahmachari had written a sequel to Artichokes Hearts (Mira in the Present Tense) I could not wait to get my hands and eyes on it. Like a memorable character does, Mira had gone on living in my mind and I was excited to see where her creator had taken her. But while Brahmachari’s second novel does continue to focus on Mira and includes character references from her previous book it did not feel like a sequel or a continuation from the first novel. So while it did not satisfy my curiosity, it does mean this book can stand on its own. A reader can begin with Jasmine Skies and not feel lost.
Jasmine Skies reintroduces the reader to Mira Levenson at the age of 14. After the passing of her grandfather, family ties were tenuously rekindled and Mira is on the way to Kolkata, India to meet her grandfather’s side of the family for the first time. In her bag she has letters taken without permission from her mother. Mira believes these letters hold the clues to discover the reason her grandfather never returned to India and why Mira’s mother and her same aged cousin, Anjali, stopped speaking. Despite the strained relationship, Mira is excited to be staying with Anjali and her daughter, Priya for three weeks. She is excited to meet members of her family for the first time and to get to know Kolkata, the place her grandfather told her stories about all her her life.
Lulu and the Duck in the Park by Hilary McKay
In Lulu and the Duck in the Park, Lulu and Mellie’s adventure begins when two dogs become unleashed at the park during their class trip. Admist the foray, ducks’ nests were disturbed and eggs were broken—except one egg in particular that Lulu whisks into her pocket to protect it. She carries the egg back to school with her and tries her best to keep it a secret—for a short while, even from her friend Mellie. Her secret becomes too difficult to withhold as the egg slowly begins to hatch under her sweater which sets off a series of peculiar and laughable antics from Lulu.
The main character, LuLu, has an audacious personality and knack for mischief that is reminiscent of protagonists like Amber Brown and Junie B. Jones; but, instead of having a penchant for bubblegum, she loves animals and, notably so, she is a little brown girl. Readers who were acquainted with Lulu in the Lulu board books will remember that Lulu’s parents are a white mom and brown-skinned father of African Descent. These books are a fun read, the plots are humorously suspenseful, and the narratives are written seamlessly in age-appropriate language that I think will captivate young readers’ attention. I would highly recommend both of these books for boys and girls who are being introduced to longer texts and building their endurance for following a more complex narrative; surely, they will not have a problem with “seeing” themselves in gutsy, little Lulu.
Reviewer: LaTonya R. Jackson
The Way We Do It In Japan by Geneva Cobb Iljima
In the United States, much is made of accepting minorities and “exotic” cultures, but The Way We Do It In Japan reverses this scenario by dropping a little American boy, Gregory, and his mixed family (Jane from Kansas and Hidiaki from Japan) in the middle of Tokyo.
Gregory learns to do things “the way we do it in Japan” when it comes to bathing, sleeping, and speaking Japanese. But at school he finds that his peanut butter sandwich is “the wrong kind of lunch” as everyone else has rice, fish and fermented soybeans. The next day, however, the cafeteria makes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for everybody to make him feel included. In real life, however, while this may very well happen in Japan, school cafeterias in the U.S. are unlikely to all of a sudden serve fish and fermented soybeans to show their acceptance of Japanese students. So is the message here that foreign countries will always whole-heartedly embrace Americans?
The illustrations that accompany this thought-provoking story are feature exaggerated facial features, and the father’s shifty-looking facial expressions can be particularly distracting. Despite that and the debatable lesson, this book still presents a positive model of cultural acceptance, and also teaches some Japanese terms, pronunciation, and culture.
Recommended: 4-9 years
Abby Spencer Goes to Bollywood by Varsha Bajaj
Varsha Bajaj’s novel, Abby Spencer Goes to Bollywood presents the story of a bi-racial Indian-America girl who’s never met her father. She’s spent her life living in Houston, Texas with her mother being a happy, well-loved American girl who only knows one thing about her father: he is from India.
The story opens with Abby having an allergic reaction to coconut. After having to admit she knows nothing about the medical history of the father of her child, Abby’s mother realizes she needs to attempt to contact him, something she has not tried since she found out she was pregnant. After a very small window of waiting, she is finally able to contact her ex-boyfriend and as it turns out, he never received the registered letter she sent all those years ago explaining Abby’s existence. Abby not only has to deal with the shock that her father never knew about her—up until this point she believed he simply didn’t want to be a part of her life—but she also finds out he is a huge Bollywood star. The rest of the novel revolves around Abby traveling to Mumbai to meet her father and the other half of her ethnicity.
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