Books like Beautiful Blackbird
By Ashley Bryan
For families who want a bedtime story that turns 'black is beautiful' into a chant kids will repeat long after the book is closed. Musical, rhythmic, and visually bold, with a chant-like refrain running through it.
A mother cat leads her two kittens, Fluffy and Skinny, through washing, wall-walking, and claw-sharpening — while a third kitten, Boris, just naps through it all.
After spotting three dazzling mermaids on the subway, a boy transforms his home into a lagoon of imagination, fashioning his own mermaid costume from a curtain and some ferns.
A young girl in Ukraine refuses to eat borsch, no matter how hard the grandmothers of Kiev try to persuade her — but after immigrating to America, she finds herself missing the very soup she once despised.
A celebration told through many young voices, each one honoring the beauty of their own brown skin and finding themselves reflected in the natural world around them.
After an owl attack knocks a baby fruit bat from her mother's grasp, she lands in a bird's nest and is raised alongside three baby birds, learning to live by their rules — until she finds her way back to her own kind.
A curious fox sets out just to watch a mysterious parade of animals heading somewhere unknown, freeing a caged pair of doves along the way, until he finds his reason for joining them waiting by a great wooden ship.
A lonely woman welcomes a traveling salesman's pets into her home one by one, but draws the line firmly at one thing: no elephants, thank you very much.
A small boy is invited to tea at the palace and always asks the same question — may he bring a friend? — and each time, a surprising animal guest shows up beautifully behaved.
A Puerto Rican girl grows up surrounded by love and pride in her Taíno and African heritage, but painful treatment from the world slowly dims her sense of her own beauty — until her community rallies to wake her up again.
A janitor and his loyal dog, cramped and weary of their crowded one-room life, accept a mysterious bird's offer of paradise on a floating island — only to discover the price of that easy life.
A lonely old man sets out to find one pretty cat but can't choose among the millions, billions, and trillions he finds on a hillside — so he brings them all home.
A girl in Hawaiʻi who feels neither wahine nor kane sets her sights on leading her school's boys-only hula troupe in a traditional kane chant.
