By Kelly DiPucchio
A girl runs for president of her school and runs straight into how the Electoral College actually picks a winner.
Grace Campbell's teacher tapes up a poster of all the American presidents. Grace looks at it and asks where the girls are. There aren't any, and there never have been, so Grace announces she'll be the first one. Her teacher takes her seriously and runs a school-wide mock election. Grace's opponent is Thomas Cobb, the soccer captain from the class next door, and here is the part that makes the book: the teacher doesn't count heads. Every child in the school is handed a state, and each state carries its own number of electoral votes, so some children in that room are worth three votes and some are worth fifty-five. Grace campaigns. Slogans, posters, buttons, promises, the works. Thomas copies whatever she does and otherwise coasts, because he assumes the boys will simply carry him. On election day the votes are read out state by state, and it comes down to Wyoming.
The Electoral College is the hardest civics idea to teach a child this age, and this is the one book that pulls it off without ever sitting anyone down to explain it. It just happens to Grace. She wants to be president, so she has to win, so she has to find out how winning gets measured, and the answer turns out to be states, not heads. That's a real fact about how the United States picks a president, and it reaches a seven-year-old through a story she's already pulling for. Nobody lectures. Grace discovers it, and your child discovers it right over her shoulder. The other thing to know is that Grace does the work and Thomas coasts, and the book lets that be why she wins without ever turning Thomas into a villain. He's just a boy who assumed. Pham draws Grace with her clipboard and her cupcakes and her total seriousness, in a school full of every kind of face.