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Where Fiction and Reality Collide: Books and Black Lives Matter

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Where Fiction and Reality Collide: Books and Black Lives Matter

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Titlewave did not have:
‘Tyler Johnson Was Here,’ by Jay Coles
‘Dear Martin,’ by Nic Stone
‘I Am Alfonso Jones,’ Written by Tony Medina and Illustrated by John Jennings and Stacey Robinson
‘Ghost Boys,’ by Jewell Parker Rhodes

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'All American Boys,' by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely

Jason Reynolds still vividly recalls when his mother gave him "the talk" about how to behave around police officers. "That talk has saved my life many a time," Mr. Reynolds said.

In 2014, after an officer shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Mr. Reynolds and the author Brendan Kiely decided to team up to write "All American Boys," a young adult novel. In it, a quiet and artistic teenager is shopping for chips at a bodega when a police officer mistakes him for a shoplifter and assaults him.

Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Kiely assumed no one would publish the book, and planned to put it online for free if they couldn't sell it.

"When Black Lives Matter started, it was polarizing," Mr. Reynolds said. "Does any publishing company want to bring forth static around something so fresh?"

In fact, "All American Boys," which came out in 2015, became a commercial hit, selling more than 120,000 copies.

'Tyler Johnson Was Here,' by Jay Coles

Jay Coles was 18 when he started writing his debut novel, "Tyler Johnson Was Here," about a boy whose twin brother is a victim of police brutality. While the characters were fictional, Mr. Coles said he had been motivated to write the novel after Trayvon Martin, 17, was killed in Florida. "I put myself in a deep depression while writing it," he said.

A few months ago, Mr. Coles, who grew up in Indianapolis and is now a senior in college, sold the book to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, which will publish it next spring.

"I want people to leave with the understanding that it's O.K. to be angry and loud when it comes to seeking justice," he said.

'Dear Martin,' by Nic Stone

In Nic Stone's debut novel, "Dear Martin," Justyce, a smart, ambitious black high school scholarship student at an elite prep school, gets caught up in a heated exchange between his best friend and an off-duty police officer, who shoots at them. In the frenzied media coverage that follows, Justyce is stunned to find himself described as a gang member.

His story is interspersed with letters he writes to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., lamenting how little race relations have improved since the civil rights movement. Crown Books for Young Readers will publish the novel this fall.

Ms. Stone, 31, who lives in Atlanta and has two young sons, said she had written the book after a string of high-profile shootings of unarmed African-American teenagers left her feeling gutted.

"When it comes to the heavier issues, fiction gives you this bubble, where you can grapple with things without somebody in your face," she said.

'I Am Alfonso Jones,' Written by Tony Medina and Illustrated by John Jennings and Stacey Robinson

In this forthcoming young adult graphic novel written by Tony Medina, a poet and prolific children's books author, a teenager named Alfonso Jones is killed by an off-duty police officer, then watches from the afterlife as his family struggles to bring the shooter to justice.

The story will be illustrated by John Jennings, who illustrated the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's "Kindred," and Stacey Robinson, who works with Mr. Jennings as part of the collaborative team "Black Kirby." It will be published this fall by Tu Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books.

'Ghost Boys,' by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Jewell Parker Rhodes, an award-winning children's book author, has never shied away from emotionally challenging subjects. Her previous novels have addressed national tragedies like Hurricane Katrina and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Her next novel, "Ghost Boys," which Little, Brown Books for Young Readers will publish next spring, is a surreal tale that tackles recent police shootings and the country's long history of racially motivated crimes.

The narrative unfolds from the point of view of a ghost - a young black boy who is shot by a white police officer and observes what happens after his death. In the afterlife, the boy meets the ghosts of other black boys, including the spirit of Emmett Till. Because of the book's violent premise and its proximity to real events, the novel is being recommended for slightly older middle-grade readers, ages 10 and up.

"Children and teens are reading and hearing about this in the news all the time, and fiction gives them an entry point to understanding it better and helping them to empathize with all sides," said Alvina Ling, the vice president and editor in chief of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

'How It Went Down,' by Kekla Magoon

The young adult novel "How It Went Down," which was written by Kekla Magoon and came out in 2014, explores the aftermath of a shooting from multiple perspectives. After a white man shoots Tariq Johnson, a 16-year-old African-American boy, witnesses offer conflicting accounts of what happened - whether Tariq was armed, and what precipitated the violence.

In a review, School Library Journal said the book "raises such difficult, thorny issues and doesn't try to offer any easy answers."

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police brutality  misconduct and shootings

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Where Fiction and Reality Collide: Books and Black Lives Matter

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'All American Boys,' by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely Jason Reynolds still vividly recalls when his mother gave him "the talk" about how to behave around police officers. "That talk has saved my life many a time," Mr. Reynolds said.

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We Need Diverse Books™ is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and a grassroots organization of children's book lovers that advocates essential changes in the publishing industry to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people.

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We Need Diverse Books™ is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and a grassroots organization of children's book lovers that advocates essential changes in the publishing industry to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people.

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American Indians in Children's Literature (AICL)

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Designed to help readers develop a critical eye about representations of American Indians in children's and young adult books

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American Indian Library Association - Working to improve library and information services for American Indians

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The American Indian Library Association is a membership action group that works to improve library and information services for American Indians and Alaska Natives.

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Article: Verse Novels for Reluctant Readers

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Article: Verse Novels for Reluctant Readers

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Novels in verse have earned their place in the mainstream of children's and young adult literature - Exhibit A: Kwame Alexander's The Crossover winning the Newbery Medal - and this is good news for reluctant readers, especially reluctant middle-grade and middle-school readers. Compared to a conventional novel, a novel in verse has perhaps half the number of words per page - and isn't that half the battle with reluctant readers? These readers often look at a page filled with words and think, This is too much! And quit before they begin. I recently told a young man, an eighth grader who loves baseball, that he should try Hard Hit by Ann Warren Turner. I opened the book and showed him the pages: words only on the left-hand pages, written in verse; blank right-hand pages. I told him he could probably read the book in about an hour. He came back the very next morning, excited, with a huge smile on his face, surprised - and proud - that he had finished it. (He also said, "You didn't tell me it was sad! ") But what really matters is that a reluctant reader felt successful. He read an entire novel in one night.

Novels in verse can be especially appealing to reluctant readers because they use so much vivid imagery, and I have found that many reluctant readers are visual learners. Poetry expresses meaning through the graphic placement of words on the page. Can't you see the papaya seed when you read these lines from Thanhhà Lại's Inside Out & Back Again?

Look at the placement of the words in another verse novel, Jen Bryant's Kaleidoscope Eyes, and see how it corresponds with the meaning:

Another week of digging.
More blisters.
Shoulders ache.

Still
a big,
empty hole.

Readers see the hole; they don't just read the words. The picture instantly makes reading, normally an abstract activity, suddenly concrete. (By the way, concrete poetry is a great way to introduce poetry to the reluctant reader, but that's another story.)

And what about kinesthetic learners? And auditory learners? By the time Sharon Creech writes in Heartbeat that main character Annie loves to run, the reader already knows it, feels it, hears it, because the very first words in this novel are " Thump-thump, thump-thump." This repetition continues throughout the short book. The reader learns so much about Annie by feeling what Annie feels, physically and emotionally.

In the middle grades, emotions often run high. Students are changing physically, intellectually, and emotionally, and all of these changes happen quickly. Middle graders' high-octane emotions sometimes manifest in tears, fights, moodiness, fits of laughter and giggles, defiance in their search for independence...and frequently do so at the most inopportune times. Because they are poetry, novels in verse often tap more directly into the emotions of their characters. One middle-grade boy cried at the end of Creech's Love That Dog. He, too, had lost his beloved dog and understood the protagonist's pain.

We need more diverse books, and many novels in verse published for children contain multicultural elements. Some of the reluctant readers in our library are our English language learner students. Maddie, part Cuban, gobbled up various novels in verse by Margarita Engle and Carmen T. Bernier-Grand: César: Sí, se puede! / Yes, We Can!; The Firefly Letters: A Suffragette's Journey to Cuba; The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom, and others. But diverse verse novels are a wonderful way to introduce all readers to other worlds and ways of living.

Books about immigrants, too, allow readers to see aspects of various cultures. Becoming Joe DiMaggio, a historical novel in verse by Maria Testa about an Italian family who admires Joe DiMaggio, may be especially enjoyed by a baseball lover or a student with Italian family roots; either way, a reluctant reader will have made a connection and broadened his or her horizons by learning about a sport or what it feels like to be an immigrant.

We have read and heard much about the reluctant male reader, but little about the reluctant female reader. Why? In my experience, there are more uninterested, unmotivated, and/or insecure reluctant male readers, but that doesn't mean that all reluctant readers are males (or even, for that matter, sports-loving males). Fortunately, many verse novels feature female protagonists. May in May B. by Caroline Starr Rose must fight to survive alone during a prairie winter (and the subplot concerning her dyslexia may resonate with some reluctant readers). Looking for Me by Betsy R. Rosenthal features a female protagonist, Edith, who must solve the mystery of who she is as a middle child in a very large family.

The reluctant reader cannot be stereotyped if we expect to reach him or her with a good read. Reluctant readers are as varied in interests as those who love to read, and luckily novels in verse come in many genres, both fiction and nonfiction. Consider The Year of Goodbyes: A True Story of Friendship, Family, and Farewells by Debbie Levy. This powerful nonfiction title, based on the author's mother's childhood in Nazi Germany, describes the systematic degradation of the Jewish population as seen through eleven-year-old Jutta's eyes. Or give the verse biography Twelve Rounds to Glory: The Story of Muhammad Ali by Charles R. Smith to the student who wants to know more about the famous boxer but who normally wouldn't pick up a biography because they are "too wordy."

I enjoy mysteries, and so do many of my middle-grade students, especially the reluctant readers. At this age, students' own lives hold so much unknown that the idea of solving a mystery is appealing, even if subconsciously. Also, mysteries tend to present situations middle-grade readers might secretly (or not-so-secretly) wish for: adventure, the thrill of the chase. Many mysteries provide more thoughtful and reflective elements as well. Kaleidoscope Eyes takes the reader on a treasure hunt - and not just any treasure, but the treasure that belonged to Captain William Kidd - while it explores the strong friendship between three characters, two white and one black, during the 1960s. Although the mystery is great fun, the beauty of this novel is the exposure that middle-grade readers get to what it may have been like to live in the 1960s. They learn about racial prejudice, the Vietnam War, the feminist movement, and in the process they learn a little more about what it means to be a young person in our own era.

I encourage librarians and teachers to take the next opportunity to talk up books in verse. How about a book discussion about Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse, perhaps pairing it with a documentary about the 1930s Great Dust Bowl? Connect it to the curriculum if you can. Have a good time together. Soon you may have fewer reluctant readers in your library - or at least a few more students asking you about novels in verse.

Books in Verse for Middle-Grade Readers

Becoming Joe DiMaggio (Candlewick, 2002) by Maria Testa; illus. by Scott Hunt

César!: Sí, se puede! / Yes, We Can! (Cavendish, 2006) by Carmen T. Bernier-Grand; illus. by David Diaz

The Crossover (Houghton, 2014) by Kwame Alexander

The Firefly Letters: A Suffragette's Journey to Cuba (Holt, 2010) by Margarita Engle

Hard Hit (Scholastic, 2006) by Ann Warren Turner

Heartbeat (Cotler/HarperCollins, 2004) by Sharon Creech

Inside Out & Back Again (Harper/HarperCollins, 2011) by Thanhhà Lại

Kaleidoscope Eyes (Knopf, 2009) by Jen Bryant

Looking for Me (Houghton, 2012) by Betsy R. Rosenthal

Love That Dog (Harper/HarperCollins, 2001) by Sharon Creech

May B. (Schwartz & Wade/Random, 2012) by Caroline Starr Rose

Out of the Dust (Scholastic, 1997) by Karen Hesse

The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom (Holt, 2008) by Margarita Engle

Twelve Rounds to Glory: The Story of Muhammad Ali (Candlewick, 2007) by Charles R. Smith; illus. by Bryan Collier

The Year of Goodbyes: A True Story of Friendship, Family, and Farewells (Disney-Hyperion, 2010) by Debbie Levy

From the March/April 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Field Notes: "This Is Too Much!" Why Verse Novels Work for Reluctant Readers

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Novels in verse have earned their place in the mainstream of children's and young adult literature - Exhibit A: Kwame Alexander's The Crossover winning the Newbery Medal - and this is good news for reluctant readers, especially reluctant middle-grade and middle-school readers.

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Good Night Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo              

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Good Night Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo              

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N/A on Titlewave yet. Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is a children's book packed with 100bedtime stories about the life of 100extraordinary women from the past and the present, illustrated by 60 female artists from all over the world.

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Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls is a children's book packed with 100 bedtime stories about the life of 100 extraordinary women from the past and the present, illustrated by 60 female artists from all over the world.