Books like Beatrice and Croc Harry — picked by fans

Yasmin is a bookworm, so I immediately felt like we had an important bond. Also, I could totally relate to her feeling insignificant in the face of big adult decisions. Yasmin doesn’t stay in that spot, though. She looks around at her resources – dear friends, family, neighbours, and a great idea – and realises that she can have influence in the world around her. This book is a brilliant celebration of community activism, books, and friendship that had me cheering on the characters right to the end. 

Katherine Hannigan creates quirky characters that I love, so when I saw True (… Sort Of) in our apartment building’s book exchange box, I snatched it up. Delly Patterson is an unlikely hero. She starts the book as the town troublemaker, bold in a way that I never dared to be as a child. Reading this book was like catapulting myself into a wilder, more adventurous childhood of my own without getting into trouble myself. Delly eventually uses her boldness to stand up for someone with more bravery than many adults might have. (I’d also like to give a shout-out to Katherine Hannigan for including a nonbinary character at a time when hardly anyone else – in society, and especially in children’s books – acknowledged nonbinary people.)

Just like me, Eddie loves books. Unlike me, Eddie is a shiny, green bug. (Clearly, I need to get over my bias against books including talking creatures!) Linda Bailey told this story so vividly that I soon became Eddie, painstakingly making my way across the ginormous landscape inside the school. How on earth could a tiny bug save his aunt, nevermind an entire school library? You’ll have to read the book to find out, but I can tell you that readers finish this story feeling like we can do anything we set our minds to!

Everyone expects Fishel “Fish” Rosner to do “boy” things, which doesn’t include his favourite activities of knitting and dancing. I loved watching Fish learn to stand up for himself, and even more, I love how this story invites readers to imagine a world where everyone has the confidence to be themselves, no matter what anyone else thinks. This book kept me grinning long after I finished reading.

Much of my struggle with any form of exercise stems from lack of self-confidence and poor self-image. In his humorous collection of comics, best-selling author “The Oatmeal” lays out what goes in inside most runners’ (and many non-runners’) minds. Food! Weight! Getting lost! Oh my! By poking fun at this somewhat insane sport that I’ve come to love (which many nonrunners call punishment) and his naming of that inner critic as “The Blerch” made me feel seen and heard. It’s truly a classic and one of his best works.

I became involved in anti-racist politics as a student. The first campaign I organized was a protest against a lecturer who had written an essay advocating the deportation of everyone in Britain who was not white. The lecturer presented his argument in terms of the need for cultural homogeneity, which meant he did not have to make easily discredited claims of racial superiority. While the racism was obvious to me, I was struck by how many people believed the lecturer’s cultural argument. To respond to it required understanding how racist arguments could change their form, as older racist ideas lost their plausibility. For a while, I struggled to make sense of this. Then I came across Martin Barker’s book and all my confusion was dispelled. Accessible even as it wrestles with complex ideas of culture and biology, The New Racism shows how, from Enoch Powell onwards, conservatism in Britain has… show more.

Such a rule breaker. A complete disregard for the laws of nature. That can’t happen! I shouldn’t feel so for those characters! And yet, and yet! The characters that people these pages are real and convincing. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah takes us in and out of realities. His world is dark sibling to our everyday world, but even his most flawed characters resonate with dignity, and through skillful well-crafted revelation, the reader comes to understand why these characters struggle—often against societal forces larger/older/engrained—and even when his characters make bad decisions (lord knows a misbehaving character is what good fiction is about) a glimmer of the potential for human goodness is exposed. This a contemporary voice, fierce and fresh, and worth paying attention to.

A restaurant where customers walked through a caricatured Black man’s mouth to enter? A fine dining establishment that advertised itself as a Slave Market? An eatery housed in a giant mammy that sells mammy-shaped lamps? This sounds like a racist dystopia, but it’s not–it is the reality documented in Naa Oyo A. Kwate’s book about racist restaurants, past and present. You may feel queasy about going out to eat after ingesting these sordid tales. 

In the introduction to the first edition of Black Boy, Richard Wright acknowledges that while inspired by his life the book is both a record of his life and an imagined autobiography of all the “black boys” he knew who like him came of age in the segregated south.

Wright’s book is an early example of the use of creative nonfiction techniques that make this memoir gripping, suspenseful, deeply psychological, and a testimony to the power of dreams and the will to prevail against adversity.

In colonial North America, plantation owners were equal opportunity exploiters who mistreated European and African laborers alike, and workers frequently resisted by running away, stealing or destroying property, and engaging in occasional rebellions. Theodore Allen explains how colonial elites invented America’s racial divide through a series of laws that ended up enslaving most African Americans for life and reserving the rights of freedom and citizenship for European Americans. Since then, race and class have been intertwined, laying the basis for white supremacist practices and beliefs that shaped the development of the United States and continue to allocate wealth and power unequally today.