Books like Julián Is a Mermaid
By Jessica Love
For the kid who turns every quiet afternoon into a costume-and-imagination event, Julián's homemade transformation feels like watching their own daydream come to life. Tender, dreamlike, and joyfully colorful, with a quiet emotional current running underneath.
A girl who left her homeland as a baby must draw it for a school assignment, so she gathers memories from family and neighbors to imagine her way back to The Island.
A biracial girl with red hair and brown skin mixes polka dots with stripes and eats peanut butter and jelly burritos, refusing to pick just one side of who she is.
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 witch famous throughout Russia for eating children is secretly a lonely old woman who longs for a grandchild, so she disguises herself as a village babushka to find one.
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.
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 girl and her house full of rescued, misfit creatures grow restless and decide to move on — but when every one of her careful plans falls apart, she has to find another way forward.
When her mother asks why she likes being little, a young girl answers back with a list of the small, particular joys of childhood that grown-ups tend to overlook.
A friendly ghost named Leo loves drawing and making snacks, but when a new family misunderstands his attempts to help, he leaves home to find where he truly belongs.
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.
Voted the most beautiful bird in the forest, a glossy blackbird is begged by the red, yellow, blue, and green birds to paint markings of black onto their feathers so they can be beautiful too.
A foreign exchange student named Eric moves in with a suburban family, asking curious questions his hosts can't always answer, until his farewell leaves behind an unforgettable surprise.
