By Ruby Shamir
A question-and-answer book about how American elections work, from the school board to the presidency, and about who was once kept from the vote.
This one has no plot and doesn't want one. It's built out of questions and answers: a short block of main text on each spread, ringed with little boxes of facts that a child will read first and out of order, which is fine, because that's how it's meant to be read. It goes wide. Not only the presidency but the school board, the mayor, the state, and how those differ. Where ballots came from and how they got secret. Why election day is a Tuesday in November. And then the part the book is really about: who was allowed to vote and who was not. Women. Black Americans. Native Americans, who were not made citizens until 1924. The children who marched in the civil rights movement, and the campaign that dropped the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. Faulkner draws it all as crowds, busy and cartoonish, packed with every sort of person.
Everything else on this shelf teaches structure: who does what, which branch, which building. This is the one that teaches taking part, and it does it by being specific rather than stirring. It tells a nine-year-old what a school board is. It tells them the vote was withheld and had to be won, from whom, and when, with dates. And it puts children in the story on purpose, more than once: a child can close it having read that people their own age helped change the rules, which sits differently than being told that voting matters. The question-and-answer build is also why it works for a child who won't sit through a book. Nothing has to be read in order, nothing has to be finished. Hand it over and let them graze.