Books like Goin' Someplace Special
By Patricia C. McKissack
For families ready to talk about fairness and history together, this is a gentle but honest way into a hard conversation, grounded in one girl's determined walk across her own city. Tender, resolute, quietly powerful, with warmth even in hard moments.
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 boy who longs to be a trumpeter can only play an imaginary horn, until a musician from the neighborhood night club notices his ambition and takes him seriously.
A picture-book biography traces Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s path from a childhood in the segregated South to becoming a minister and civil rights leader, told through his own powerful words.
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.
Born into slavery, a woman hears the voice of God calling her north and escapes through the woods with only her faith, beginning the journey that will make her Moses to her people.
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.
A young Japanese American artist grows up determined to draw, even as her family is sent to a WWII internment camp — and she goes on to create groundbreaking picture books that show children of every race together.
An enslaved man endures separation from his family in Virginia, then hits on a desperate plan: mailing himself in a wooden crate to freedom in the North.
A woman who loves the trees of her Kenyan homeland begins planting seeds one by one, teaching other women to do the same, until the whole country grows strong and green again.
A lyrical, free-verse journey traces enslaved Black Americans' path to freedom, from the moment shackles fell in 1865 Galveston, Texas to how Juneteenth is honored today.
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.
An egg named Humpty Dumpty loves nothing more than watching birds from high on the city wall — until a great fall leaves him terrified of heights, and he must find the courage to climb again.
