Dear Reader: A Love Letter to Libraries

A rousing call to action for more racially diverse children’s literature. -Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW In this book a young girl pens a love letter to libraries and books, and powerfully expresses the need for diversity and the importance of representation in stories!

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 that look like her, and the only ones that do tell about the most painful parts of their history. Where are the heroines with Afros exploring other planets and the superheroes with ‘locs saving the day?