Books that address diversity
Ellis, D. (2000). The breadwinner. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.
Parvana and her family live in Taliban-run Afghanistan where women and girls have been banned from schools, jobs, and leaving the house without a male escort. Her parents, formerly well-to-do educators in Kabul, are now struggling to make ends meet as her father lost a leg when his school was bombed. Parvana helps him to the marketplace each day where he offers to read and write letters for those who cannot do either. When he is imprisoned without warning, Parvana's mother, her sisters, and her baby brother must find a way to survive. With the help of a neighbor, they decide to dress Parvana as a boy so she can freely roam the city in hopes of finding work to feed her family. The dangers are very real. If the Taliban discovers her secret, she will most certainly be killed and her family doomed.
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Personally, I do not have much experience with what life is like firsthand in Afghanistan so this was very enlightening to me. The language is very accessible to a wide age range but the topics are heavy. There is one point in the story where 4 thieves are escorted into the local soccer arena and all 4 publicly lose one of their hands as a consequence for their crime. The hands are then strung together and tossed about like a grotesque string of beads. For this reason, I do not consider this a book for younger readers and more appropriate for YA audiences. I also like how the end is not all neatly wrapped up and has the potential to be a call to action for readers to become more involved in learning about what may be done to help improve the lives of women and girls living in Afghanistan and in refugee camps in Pakistan.
Goodreads
Williams-Garcia, R. (2010). One crazy summer. New York, NY: Scholastic.
The three Gaither sisters, Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern, have never met their mother, Cecile. She left when Delpine was about 5 and Fern was only a few weeks old. The summer of 1968, the girls are loaded on an airplane in New York City by Pa and their grandmother, Big Ma, and sent out to Oakland to spend the summer with the mother they know very little about. The girls have California Dreams on their minds and not the racially tense neighborhood Cecile calls home. The girls are sent each day to "The People's Center" where they are fed (because their mother cannot be bothered to do so) and educated in the ways of the Black Panthers. The sisters not only earn the respect of their poet mother but begin to feel something from her like love instead of the disdain and disregard they are used to.
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In the beginning, I had half expected some miraculous transformation to occur on the part of the mother. I am pleased this never happened because it truly showed the inner struggle and growth the girls had to make. They had to face a sad and unchangeable truth: that their mother wasn't a "mom" and would never really be. The sisters also had to discover and experience the Black Panthers for themselves and draw their own conclusions about how they wanted to be a part of it with very little direct guidance from their mother. In this, we see how children can be forced to think like grown ups and make very adult decisions.