By Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, Ann Hazzard
A police officer shoots a Black man in one town, and two families, one Black and one white, sit down at their own kitchen tables and answer their children's questions about it.
Emma and Josh are in the same class. Something has happened in their town, and it's on the news and in every grown-up conversation they overhear: a police officer shot a Black man. So they ask. The book alternates between the two houses. Emma's white family fumbles at first, calling it a mistake, until her older sister says plainly that the man was shot because he was Black, and the conversation opens out into slavery, into what got handed down, into why this keeps happening. Josh's Black family is angrier and more practical: his father says what the officer did was wrong, his brother says cops stick up for each other, his parents tell him some officers make good choices and that he still can't count on it. At school the next day a new boy arrives who looks different and sounds different, and nobody will sit with him. Emma and Josh do. That's the ending. Three child psychologists wrote it, and there's a long parent's note in the back with actual scripts.
It does the one thing almost no picture book does, which is show you the conversation itself rather than the history. Your child hears two families answer the same question in two different kitchens, which is closer to how this actually arrives in a life. Nothing is shown, everything is talked about, and the talking is the book. The back matter was written by psychologists and it is unusually concrete, with the questions children ask at each age and things you might actually say back.