Black Books Galore! Guide to Great African American Children's Books

[helens78]

Have you been looking around for lists of African-American-centric children's books? Oh my, have I got the lists for you.

Black Books Galore! Guide to Great African American Children's Books by Donna Rand, Toni Trent Parker, and Sheila Foster

(It also has a sequel: More Great African American Children's Books, plus one for girls and one for boys. I have all of those out from the library right now, but haven't read any of them yet!)

These lists were compiled by authors who had struggled to find children's books that showed positive portrayals of African-Americans -- especially African-American kids! -- and African-Americans doing different things in history:

[At an African American children's book festival, one] of the boys took a book, Reflections of a Black Cowboy, from one of our display tables and began to read it. After a while he looked up at Sheila, our founding partner, with an expression of surprise and disbelief. "There is no such thing as a black cowboy!" he said. "Oh, yes there is!" Sheila responded and handed him two other books about black cowboys, pioneers, and mountain men.

Even reading the book of recommendations will teach you things you never knew about African-American history, not to mention giving you lists of "must read" books (I wrote down 117 books by 93 different authors; I look forward to going to my library and just sitting down with a list sometime in the near future, seeing what I can find).

The book is incredibly well-organized, and there are indexes of titles, authors, illustrators, and topics. There are sidebars with many of the authors and illustrators, and an appendix listing the Coretta Scott King winners and honorees as well as listing Newbery and Caldecott award books with African-American/African themes and Reading Rainbow selections with African-American/African themes.

It was a little exhausting inhaling this particular book; reading 500 book reviews over two sittings has made my brain feel very, very full. XD (The other books contain 450, 360, and "over 350" recommendations, respectively; I don't yet know how much overlap they contain, although I gather there's none between the first and second.)

Comments

[sanguinity]

I saw those mentioned somewhere in the RaceFail linkspam (brainmelt as to where!), and they looked pretty fab. :-D

What age ranges do they cover? Is YA included?

:: Even reading the book of recommendations will teach you things you never knew about African-American history, not to mention giving you lists of "must read" books ::

I had exactly that same reaction to Oyate's A Broken Flute. Except in that one, they review a bunch of the bad books, too, so you do end up with a heavy sampling of white racism about Indians, too. Deconstructed racism, to be sure, but still.)

[helens78]

The books cover everything from baby books to YA, broken up into sections (0-3, 4-8, 9-11, 12 and up). In the first book, 4-8 is by far the biggest age range, but even the 12 and up section has 60 recs! \o/

[akamarykate.livejournal.com]

Oh, these look fantastic, especially since I joined this community specifically to widen the scope of the children's lit I read. Thanks so much!

[helens78]

Yay! Glad to pass these along! :D

[dustdaughter.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the review and these links. I'm going to pass the boys list on to my sister. Hopefully, she can find some books my nephew will enjoy!

[triciasullivan.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for posting this. I think I'd seen it somewhere else in the linkspam, too, but odds of finding a way back to it? Slim.

I have kids, and my friends have kids--this will be good to have.