Books like Tar Beach
By Faith Ringgold
For the kid who stares out car windows dreaming up impossible places to go, Cassie Louise Lightfoot's rooftop flight feels like permission to imagine bigger. Dreamy, starlit, quietly triumphant, rooted in real family and real city streets.
A motherless princess learns her father plans to trade her to an Ogre for fifty wagons of silver, so she devises her own escape — hidden in a coat of a thousand furs.
A child drifts into a dream that carries her across the ocean to Africa, where the faces, places, and rhythms of an ancestral homeland come vividly to life.
A poem-wish spoken over a growing girl, asking that she be shielded from nightmares at three, false friends at fifteen, and given clear sight and courage for whatever roads lie ahead.
Three young rebels find each other while playing outside, and when a local lagoon dries up and traps a bird friend, they call on their ancestors to help.
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 poor washerwoman on the island of Martinique uses her mother's magic wand to help her beloved goddaughter Cendrillon win the heart of a rich man's son.
On the night a child is born, the whole natural world responds — the moon lingers, geese fly home, polar bears dance — celebrating that this one and only child has arrived.
An original poem celebrates girls and girlhood in all their forms, honoring how girls have shaped history while calling them to stand together and march boldly into the future.
A rap-inspired tribute moves through the stories of Indigenous heroes past and present — Tecumseh, Sacagawea, Crazy Horse, astronaut John Herrington, NHL goalie Carey Price — all building to one message: we are people who matter.
Guided by his mother's bedtime storytelling, a young child journeys into two different forests, where each grandmother reveals her own true and enchanting version of what dragons really are.
A boy returns with his family to their yearly camping spot at Mountain Pond, but this trip is different — he's headed into first grade, and a tiger has appeared in the woods.
A poor man named Isaac dreams three times of a treasure hidden under a bridge by the royal palace, and sets out alone on a long journey to find out if the dream is true.
