Perhaps no singer-of-color, especially one of Lena Horne’s generation, can have a career unaffected by the politics of race. What is revealing to me in this beautifully-illustrated [by Elizabeth Zunon] book is the depth of Horne’s involvement in bringing about…
Category: women’s history
In time for Women’s History Month, FIRST LADIES
What’s the Big Deal About First Ladies by Ruby Shamir, illustrated by Matt Faulkner Just in time for Women’s History Month, I wanted to point out this great new book from Penguin that celebrates the many achievements of America’s First…
I DISSENT, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark
I DISSENT, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark “Speak purposefully and carry a big legal pad. . . . Read this and be inspired to work for justice through the legal system.” (Kirkus Reviews) About this picture book biography of…
Interview with Stacey Lee, Author of Outrun the Moon
Yesterday I reviewed Stacey Lee’s new historical novel, Outrun the Moon, featuring an independent and ambitious 15-year-old Chinese American girl who talks her way into an exclusive girls’ boarding school in San Francisco in 1906, only to be cut off…
Does Disaster Bring Us Together? A Review of Outrun the Moon
Hurricanes. Five-hundred year floods. A tornado outbreak. A deadly heat wave. An earthquake. All these are natural disasters that can either tear communities apart or bring them together. While it seems like the hurricanes, tornadoes, and heat waves are getting…
An Interview with Jessica Spotswood, Editor of A Tyranny of Petticoats
Young adult historical fiction has experienced a much awaited (at least for this author of historical fiction with international settings) renaissance in the past year or two. Many of the heralded titles focus on the feats of girls and young…
Returning to a Painful Past: A Review of The Door at the Crossroads
Fans of Zetta Elliott’s 2008 time travel novel for teens, A Wish After Midnight (originally self-published, then republished by Amazon Encore in 2010) have waited a long time for the sequel. Patience, however, has been rewarded by a second volume…
Clarina Nichols: Frontier Crusader for Women’s Rights by Diane Eickhoff
I very enthusiastically endorse this detailed and exacting biography. It does not focus on a particularly well-known women’s rights advocate (I had never heard of her…) and as such makes for a rounded reading of history. There are photographs…
Guest Blog by Frieda Toth, author of Help Wanted, for Women’s History Month
Seven years or so ago, I wrote a picture book called Help Wanted. It was in answer to the annoying revisionism among political conservatives, who would have us believe that a woman working outside the home is a new phenomenon.…
A Woman’s Place Is in the Lab: A Review of Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine
Many will be surprised to know that the inventor of computer programming was a woman—Ada Byron Lovelace. In her debut picture book biography, Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine (Creston, 2015) author Laurie Wallmark offers young readers an engaging…