When it appeared in 2009, Kekla Magoon’s The Rock and the River took historical fiction about the African-American experience out of the “safe” terrain of the Underground Railroad and the Civil Rights Movement to an armed revolutionary organization that confronted…
Category: Economic Justice/Poverty/Immigration
Being God by B.A. Binns
Happy Valentine’s Day from The Pirate Tree to you! Today I’m reviewing Being God by B.A. Binns, an unlikely choice for Valentine’s Day but a good one nonetheless. 17-year-old Malik Kaplan has a knack for making all the wrong…
When the President Looks Like Me
One of the treats of last month’s inauguration was listening to Richard Blanco read the poem he wrote especially for that day. Blanco, a gay Cuban American, is the youngest person to present a poem at a Presidential inauguration, and…
No Crystal Stair: an interview with Vaunda Nelson
To kick off Black History Month, I interviewed Vaunda Nelson, author of the Coretta Scott King honor book No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem. No Crystal Stair by Vaunda Nelson…
Regrets: A Review of Each Kindness
Most picture books have happy endings. The main character experiences a challenge or problem, resolves it on her own with some guidance from a wise elder, and grows in the process. Jacqueline Woodson’s haunting new picture book, Each Kindness (Nancy…
Human Rights for Kids: A Review of The Stamp Collector
Some readers might know that I’m in Portugal right now and will be here until the end of the year, as my husband has a visiting professorship. This afternoon I was looking at the bookshelf of the young woman from…
Crow: If You Think “It Can’t Happen Here”…Well, It Already Has
In the early 1990s I reviewed a historical novel for young readers, part of a historical fiction series from an educational publisher, about an interracial friendship between two 12-year-old boys in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. In the story, a…
Abandoned Children Nobody Knows
In 2004 the Japanese filmmaker Hirozaku Kore-eda released Nobody Knows, a feature film based on the story of five children in Tokyo, abandoned by their mother and forced to fend for themselves. The film gained widespread attention for its depiction…
Focus on Malawi: Laugh with the Moon and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
The small country of Malawi, in south-central Africa, rarely appears on children’s authors’ radars, but two books published in 2012—Shana Burg’s middle grade novel Laugh with the Moon (Delacorte) and the picture book version of The Boy Who Harnessed the…
Laugh with the Moon Blog Tour: An Interview with Shana Burg
This month, author Shana Burg has visited a number of blogs as part of her blog tour for her newly-released middle grade novel Laugh with the Moon (Delacorte). The novel, set in rural Malawi, portrays 13-year-old Clare, whose father has…