Books like After the Fall (How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again)
By Dan Santat
For the kid who's had a hard fall — literal or otherwise — and needs to see that getting back up is possible, After the Fall sits right there in that scared, stuck feeling with them. Tender, quiet, and ultimately hopeful — with a visual storytelling style that lingers on small emotional beats.
A timid squirrel afraid of thunder, hawks, and dark forest paths must carry soup through Buckthorn Forest to her sick Granny Oak, facing creatures who want to help — and some who want the soup.
A duckling too odd-looking for his own barnyard is mocked and driven off, then must survive hunters and harsh seasons alone before discovering what he truly is.
A young penguin named Pip-Pip longs to swim in the sea with his friends, but fear of the water holds him back until he finds the courage to take the plunge.
A Black child moves through a year of feelings, from summertime joy on his skateboard to the fear, anger, grief, and eventual peace that follow a police shooting in his community.
A teacher searches for the words to tell her class about American slavery, tracing the story from fireside tales in Africa through the Atlantic crossing to the fields of the South.
A spirited young girl navigates segregated 1950s Nashville alone, facing Jim Crow signs and painful moments on her way to the one welcoming place in town: the public library.
A young girl is separated from her mother at the last moment and must sail to America alone, only to discover the address for her family in New York has smudged into illegible ink.
A true portrait of an enslaved man in 1800s South Carolina who became a master potter, shaping massive clay jars and carving his own poetry into them despite the world telling him he had no voice.
A gentle pony too plain for the beautiful horses inside the walled city ends up the only one who can save its children when the bridge breaks in half.
A determined young dancer in the 1930s and 40s trains for ballet despite discriminatory schools, then refuses to paint her skin white for a company's offer — and rises to become the Met Opera's first Black prima ballerina.
Four small animals — a yellow bird, a white dog, an orange fox, and a brown squirrel — each face a little setback in one day, until something good turns things around for all of them.
A young girl leaves her grandmother's house in Mexico to join her parents and brother in New York, facing a new language, unfair accusations, and the slow work of calling a new place home.
