Books like Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai
By Claire A. Nivola
For the kid who asks why grown-ups don't just fix things — this shows what it looks like when one person actually starts. Grounded, hopeful, quietly powerful, rooted in a real place and a real life.
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 real-life picture book biography follows young Alma Thomas from a childhood soaking up color in Georgia to becoming a celebrated painter — teaching art for decades before beginning her own boundlessly colorful paintings near age seventy.
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 left-handed girl picks up her brother's guitar, flips it upside down to play it her own way, and by age eleven has written "Freight Train," a song the world would come to know.
A girl named Alice Rumphius vows to travel the world, live by the sea, and find a way to make the world more beautiful — and spends her life keeping that promise.
A Black boy growing up in segregated 1940s North Carolina loves to draw everything around him, but becomes a football star instead — until his dream of making art finds its way to him.
A penniless orphan boy travels to London hoping to find his fortune, and it's his clever cat's rat-catching skill that changes both their lives forever.
A biography of jazz pioneer Duke Ellington, tracing his rise from playing pool halls and cabarets as a teenager to leading his orchestra through a groundbreaking Carnegie Hall performance of Black, Brown, and Beige.
In a real Harlem neighborhood, a girl named Nevaeh calls an abandoned lot the haunted garden, until a caring man invites the local kids to transform it into a thriving farm.
A little girl named Jane grows up watching birds, trees, and animals with her toy chimpanzee Jubilee always at her side, dreaming of a life spent living among and helping all creatures.
A legendary railroad worker, born with a hammer in his hand and stronger than anyone around, takes on a steam drill to see who can dig through a mountain faster.
A young girl, her waitress mother, and her grandma save every spare coin in a big jar, hoping to finally buy a comfortable chair after a fire destroyed their old furniture.
