Dear Reader
A Love Letter to Libraries
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A young Black girl pens a love letter to libraries and books, powerfully expressing the need to see herself represented in stories. From the author that brought you M Is for Melanin.
"A rousing call to action for more racially diverse children's literature." -Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW
There was just this one thing, this nagging suspicion, that I didn't meet the criteria for a heroine's condition.
In the books that I read, an absence of melanin was a clear omission.
A voracious young reader loves nothing more than going to the library and poring through books all day, making friends with characters and going off on exciting adventures with them. However, the more she reads, the more she notices that most of the books don't have characters of color, and the only ones that do tell about the most painful parts of their history. Where are the Black heroines with Afros exploring other planets and the superheroes with 'locs saving the day?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As much a billet doux to budding authors as to readers and libraries, Rose's energetic epistolary picture book issues a call for representation: "What of the brown people like me who could do magic, fight villains, and find lost cities of gold?" The book opens with its forthright narrator, who has brown skin and wears a cat-ears headband, surrounded by books. "I devour so many books, I prefer them to meals," the text reads, as art portrays a pancake-like stack. But none of the child's favorites feature characters who look like her, and a return trip to the library in search of "characters of the same hue" only yields "books of struggle, hardship, and pain." And so, in search of "cocoa-colored mer-people,/ honey-hued dragon slayers,/ and superheroes with locs," the take-charge reader decides to become a writer, encouraging others to follow her heroic lead. Stars are sprinkled across Rose's busy unlined art, amplifying the text's powerful suggestion that stories can change the world. Ages 4–8.
