By Ellen Oh
Ten short stories from ten different authors about all kinds of children, so your child can find one that sounds like their life and one that sounds like nobody they've ever met, in the same little book.
This one came out of We Need Diverse Books, and the idea is simple: ten stories, ten authors, ten children who don't all look or live the same way. There's a basketball game that's really about a boy and his grandmother. There's a first crush and a Secret Santa. There's a road trip, a mean girl, a summer that changes someone. Kwame Alexander, Grace Lin, Matt de la Peña, Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina and others each turned in one short, complete story, so your child never has to commit to a whole novel to get a whole story. Some of these children are Black, Latino, Asian, some have families that don't match the ones in most books, and a child reading it gets to meet all of them one short story at a time.
Every story here is realistic and set in the present, so a child who finds fantasy and adventure tiring gets the thing they actually connect with, other children their age, and gets it in a form short enough to finish. Because the ten writers are some of the best working today, the quality never dips story to story. And the range is the gift: your child might see their own family in one story and, three pages later, get to know a child whose life looks nothing like theirs. That's a lot of reach for a book you can dip into for ten minutes.