I have found that children’s books are a great way to learn more about history in general or specific history-makers, so much so that children’s books are a large part of what I read for fun. There are a couple of books I read recently that fall into this category that are great options for sharing with your own children, or reading for yourself.
In February 2023, I shared a review of a book I had just read titled The Door of No Return by Kwame Alexander. It’s a novel-in-verse that talks about a family in Africa that has members that were unfortunately kidnapped and brought to America in the 1800s. What I didn’t know was that this book was going to be part of a series.
Alexander made an interesting choice of time period in the second book, Black Star. This book takes place at the beginning of The Great Migration, around the 1920s. I don’t often see books that take place during that time period, and I was curious as to how it was going to be considered a series. In Black Star, the main character is a girl named Charley who absolutely loves baseball. Any chance she gets, she is enlisting her friend, Cool Willie Green, to play so she can practice her crazy pitches. Charley is so confident that she makes a bet with her rivals that she can beat them in a baseball game, even though she doesn’t have a complete team… yet.
In this second novel-in-verse, Alexander brilliantly connects with the first book through Kofi, one of the main characters in The Door of No Return. Kofi lives with his granddaughter, Charley, and her parents and often shares with Charley stories from his life in Africa.
While I believe you don’t have to read the first book in this series before reading Black Star, because this book stands alone, I recommend reading both, especially because I cannot wait to see how Alexander ends this trilogy. Even though this is a fictional text, as a historical fiction book, there are lots of references that readers can learn from while reading. Like the first book, I would recommend this for children in fifth grade or above.
Another book I recently read, Gifts from the Garbage Truck: A True Story About the Things We (Don’t) Throw Away, is actually a picture book. Written by Andrew Larsen and illustrated by Oriol Vidal, the book is about Nelson Molina, a sanitation worker in New York City. Molina found it intriguing, almost baffling at times, what types of things people were throwing away in the trash. He began to collect some of those things himself, especially things he could fix with a tweak here or there. Molina collected so many things that he felt he could curate a museum out of the things he saved from the trash.
As I was reading Larsen’s book and looking at the illustrations, there were times that I was shocked at what Molina was able to collect, but it also caused me to do some reflecting on my own habits. Since this is a true story, it could be a great conversation-starter with children about what we choose to throw away and where things go when we put them in the trash.
Black Star and Gifts from the Garbage Truck are just a couple of recently published books that serve as examples of how we can learn history and learn about others through storytelling. Both of these books can be found at Lincoln Library or wherever books are sold.
Deana Metzke is the literacy/social studies/library coordinator for District 186 and a mom of two. For more children’s book recommendations, follow her blog at http://raisingreaders.site.
This article appears in Spring 2025 February 2025.
