As I have mentioned in my previous posts about anti-bias children's lit, girl characters in children's lit being portrayed as part of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math interests are rare. We've seen an upswing in interest and representation of girls in STEM, but the truth is, boys interests, representation, and toys remain the priority of many educators, television program producers, authors, and product developers. 

I have taken an interest in the endeavor of getting girls into STEM since before I decided to leave Halloween, as I pushed for more girl models wearing traditionally boy costumes: scientists, firefighters, fighter pilots, astronauts, etc. (I also pushed for more girl versions of superhero costumes). I realized as I did research that girls were getting the short end of the stick, and when I was a young girl, none of today's efforts at representation existed!

Brave New Girls volume 2 is due out on Kindle and in Paperback in August 2017

That is why I am extremely excited and appreciative to be a part of Brave New Girls 1 & 2, a compilation of stories written by fantastic up and coming authors, all of which feature girls in scifi and/or STEM settings and interests. I met Mary Fan, one of the authors and editors of the project, while exploring the science behind scifi fiction writing while living in New Jersey some-odd years ago, and have kept in touch with her. When she sent out the call for illustrations for Brave New Girls 1, I jumped at the chance. 

I was given two stories to illustrate the first time around, The Hive by Kate Lansing:

My illustration for The Hive will be featured in Portolium's 2017 Best of Portfolium,

"Teen science aficionado Fi has made it her duty to protect the honeybees. Not only does she love the little creatures, but her society depends on them for their survival. Something sinister is astir, though, and powerful forces are behind it. With the help of her programmer friend and a surprising ally, Fi sets out to discover the truth and share it with the world."

 and Flight of the Zephyr by Aimie K. Runyan:

"On the planet Tenturia, mining service is mandatory. But Wynn Felstrander managed to avoid it by working in her father's lab instead, after the government decided they needed her scientific skills more than another laborer. Still, she's trapped on the planet by the all-powerful regime.

When Wynn makes an important breakthrough in the process for refining the crystals used for fuel, she thinks she's finally found her ticket to freedom. But then she discovers that the Council is hiding a sinister truth about the very energy source she's spent her whole life working on. And the consequences for her mining-outpost home could be dire. Wynn soon finds herself facing the most difficult decision of her life. Should she take the Council's offer for safety? Or risk everything to leak the truth?"

When Mary announced a Volume 2 of Brave New Girls, I once again jumped at the opportunity.  This time I was able to illustrate three stories, and dove into each while also finishing up a 40+ page child study paper and studying for finals! But it was all worth it. I felt that this volume was building off of the previous, with bigger, bolder stories for girls and boys to read about brave heroines in STEM! The first I tackled was The Maker's Handbook by George Ebey:

"In a post-apocalyptic future where technology is shunned and people work as slaves for the good of their province, a young girl named Enola meets a mysterious wanderer who puts her on the terrifying and liberating path. "

Then there was The Case of the Missing Sherlock by Mary Fan herself:
 

I really enjoyed playing with black & white, and really wanted this image to reflect the excitement of vintage mystery novels like Nancy Drew.

"When her AI roommate, Sherlock, vanishes while working a case, fledgling biomedical engineer Chevonne is left to play detective after the authorities refuse to help her. Her investigation takes her into the heart of a dangerous operation that seeks to use Sherlock’s scientific know-how for their own nefarious purposes…"

And my personal favorite, The 17th Quadrennial Intergalactic Neo-Cultural Expo & Science Fair by Jeanne Kramer-Smyth:

I had a lot of fun with this one. I really wanted to get into some scifi fashion design, using my previous career in costume design, and create a magazine cover type feel, as if advertising the titular event itself!

"Up late working on their entry for the Intergalactic Science Fair, Alice and her friends are faced with a dire emergency on the space station that holds their boarding school. Can they figure out how to evacuate their classmates before time runs out?"

I'm sure everyone involved in this project hopes that their work will encourage girls to take part in STEM but also to show boys and girls alike that girl heroes do not have to fit into someone else's traditional gender roles and tropes. Just like real life girls and women, females are smart, hardworking, and ingenuitive! Illustrating these characters has not only been fun but also a part of my own mission to help and work with kids to see their potential. How many future scientists and astronauts will I meet? That's an exciting prospect!

Brave New Girls volume 2 is available August 2017, and is perfect for the young reader in your life, the classroom, or even for yourself!

I posted about trying to find Anti-Bias Children's Lit during my Diversity & Children class last semester. You can read about it Here, Here, and Here. I posted about the struggles I was coming up against in finding age and developmentally appropriate as well as current anti-bias books in my area of Southern California and online.

While I still cannot find a ton of books for ages 3 to 5 in my area, with book sections regarding anti-bias lit either non-existent (Barnes & Noble) or slim to none (C&M School Supply), and most anti-bias lists being outdated or having slim pickings online, I keep my eyes out for news regarding anti-bias children's lit.

This has led me to reading about Marley Dias, the young activist on a mission to collect 1000 books featuring black girls. Tired of reading about "white boys and dogs" (aren't we all), she started this campaign to show that there's more to reading than reading about white people. But she says it better than I can:

"I believe black girl books are really important because when you are young you want to read lots of books, but you especially like to read books with people that look like you. While I have books at home about black girls, the books at school were not diverse. Children do most of their reading in schools or because of schools. Teachers assign books that you must read. If those books are not diverse and do not show different people’s experiences then kids are going to believe that there is only one type of experience that matters. Also, if books are not diverse then kids will not learn about the experiences of other members in their community." (Grassroots Community Foundation)

It reminds me of all the assigned reading featuring troubled white boys and men trying to find their ways, like The Outsiders, Flowers for Algernon, and The Call of the Wild. Even the stories in the special English classes I took (Creative Reading and Writing) had white male protagonists. There was a smattering of female characters in there...but they were usually white, too. If you look at this Goodreads list of required reading, you can mentally check off as you go: white protagonist, white protagonist, white protagonist - with few exceptions to provide hiccups to the monotony.

Some teachers, of course, would have bookshelves with other books in them.These were the shelves that housed Maus and other holocaust books, and whatever was donated to that particular teacher, usually in the form of drug store novels by Koontz and Crichton. I think I and maybe two other kids actually read from those shelves, which were often just provided for extra credit book report reasons anyway. Required reading was boring, and often taught kids that reading was not worth exploring.

I do remember one book that was required reading about a black female protagonist: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

One!


I was a rather prolific reader in school, and to be honest, I can't remember many non-white protagonists in children's books. Maybe Claudia in The Babysitter's Club and Julie from Julie of the Wolves. I don't remember one Mexican-American mixed race girl protagonist...someone like me. I think there was one in the book with a Hispanic protagonist: And Now, Miguel. It's very hard for me to remember much more than that.

That's a problem for someone who graduated high school in 2000. That's a continued problem if this is still how it is for kids in school today. We cannot change narrative to include other perspectives if we don't actually provide diverse narrative!

I still love this book! I think it definitely deserves to be read by children everywhere.

I am definitely interested in changing the required reading lists kids and teens will face in schools. I love that Marley Dias is taking a step forward and inspiring so many. I even sent Grassroots a suggested for a book that I didn't see on the list, Ada Twist, Scientist, which I reviewed in my previous posts. I'll continue posting about this subject as more opportunities and campaigns like this become available and they pass my feed.


If you'd like to read some of Marley's favorites, check them out here.

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I was tired. I had read several children's lit books, trekked to several bookstores, and had read pretty much every anti-bias children's lit booklist to be found. Spurred on by Anti-Bias Curriculum's requirements for anti-biased books, I pressed on, and turned to the last book I had found.

I Am Jazz
I Am Jazz is a book co-written by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, with Jazz herself being the titular character of the book. It is an autobiographical pre-school age picture book, chronicling the first few years of Jazz's life, especially as she discovered she is transgendered as a toddler.

I have been aware of Jazz Jennings for a while, and if you watch TV or Youtube you may have come across her. I came across her story when a few transgendered friends of mine posted about her on Facebook some years ago. Every once in a while I would check her Youtube channel to see how her story has progressed. Jazz is now a teenager, and is facing a whole new set of challenges that are common among transgendered teens. I was interested to see that she had published I Am Jazz, and decided to buy it.

I Am Jazz is intended for preschool age to young grade school age children.

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See Part One here.

'The next leg of my quest to find a great anti-bias book had me looking at other anti-bias themes. I was a bit sad to abandon STEM representation, but Ada Twist, Scientist came the closest to fulfilling my needs for this assignment, but missed out on targeted audience age ranges. That left me needing a book that satisfied Anti-Bias Curriculum's requirements for children ages 3 to 5.

I set out to find booklists with anti-bias books, but only found a few. Pinterest had a few hits, and I gathered four into a bookstore shopping cart and checked out, hoping for the best.

All the Colors of the Earth
This is a cute book written and illustrated by Sheila Hamanaka that gently shows children how everyone has a different skin tone and different physical qualities that make them unique. The illustrations are realistic oil-painted scenes, and the prose is a very simple poem.

All the Colors of the Earth compares children's skin and hair to colors and textures found in nature.

There are no main characters, but tons of little kids shown playing, pretending, and enjoying each other's differences. There are plenty of opportunities for the teacher to bring sounds and textures into the experience, with bear roars, whispers, and musical sounds - like rainmakers and chimes - being mentioned.

I do feel like the poem stretched a bit to make things work, and for the book itself to be overly simple. However, it was my favorite multi-cultural book after perusing several others. I kept it in mind and moved to another.

The Teddy Bear
I was drawn to this book after visiting Peace Library's anti-bias book list, as it provided visibility to an often invisible group of people. Written by David McPhail, the story is one about a boy who loses his favorite toy in a restaurant, only for said toy to be adopted by a homeless man who finds it in the trash.

The Teddy Bear features the often excluded homeless population in its storyline.

I found the illustrations to be a little outdated, but I think children might find them appealing still. The prose was easy to read and follow, and did not have words that were too big for preschoolers to understand. The boy, who is not named, loses his Teddy Bear at a restaurant, but soon forgets about the toy when it could not be found. Unbeknownst to him, the Teddy Bear - alone and frightened - had been thrown out in the trash, where a homeless man finds it and adopts it as his own.

While at first frightened, the Teddy Bear soon finds a home with the homeless man, and waits patiently while the homeless man makes his rounds during the day. However, one day the homeless man leaves the Teddy Bear to wait on a bench, and the little boy recognizes it while passing by. The boy grabs up the Teddy Bear, but then sees the homeless man crying when he returned to the park bench to find his new companion missing.

The boy returns the Teddy Bear to him in a show of compassion, understanding that the bear meant more to this man than it did to him.

I loved this book because of the message of compassion, and also how it portrayed the homeless man. Any adult who reads this will know that the man in this book is homeless, and along with the word 'homeless' comes with certain other words that have become a part of the stereotype of homelessness: ugly, dirty, lazy, crazy, etc. However, anyone who has spent time with homeless people knows that this is a harmful stereotype.

The book tells the story that returns the humanity to the homeless character. He is seen as a person who has basic needs and wants much like any other. He needs a place to stay, he needs things to do, he needs food to eat, and he needs company in the face of loneliness. When everyone's choices are reduced to these concepts, it's not hard to see how everyone is in pursuit of some similar things. The boy sees this when he sees the homeless man crying over the loss of the Teddy Bear, and has compassion, understanding as only a child could what a simple Teddy Bear can do for someone so distraught.

While I loved this book, I didn't choose it for the project. I felt that for the teacher of this class, this may not have been a wise choice, as it could be seen as promoting putting children in dangerous situations. I wasn't a fan of the boy's parents not staying by his side while in the park. It seemed to me that for a moment, the parents didn't even know that their kid was gone! Compassion is a very real thing that the world needs more of, but that doesn't mean the parents shouldn't be watching their child.

Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born
Ok first of all, let me say I was a little starstruck when I got the book and saw it was written by Jamie Lee Curtis. If she ever reads this, all I can say is I loved you as Jessica Day's mom! Plus many other characters!

But anyway. I picked this book because it is about adopted children. I have a cousin who is adopted, and ever since she had been adopted when I was 14, I wanted to adopt kids. It is still a dream of mine. I always thought, "Why make more when there are plenty of other kids who need mommies?" While I have yet to realize my dream, I still hold adopted and foster children as important. I was glad to see that books exist for adopted kids.

Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born is a story about the day a child gets adopted.

The premise of the book is simple. A child wants their adoptive mommy and daddy to tell them the story of the night they were born. However, it is obvious that the child has heard this story numerous times before, and tells it themselves (with a photo album labelled 'ME' at the ready)! The child talks about how their parents received a call in the middle of the night, and how their parents rushed onto a plane and to a hospital to meet them. The book also talks about how the child was adopted from a mother who was too young to take care of them, and how the adoptive parents settled into parenthood.

The book lets the audience know that, like any biological family might've done for the child, this adoptive set of parents made sure their adopted child knew they were wanted and loved.

I found this book to be very cute and easy to read, but I found the illustrations by Laura Cornell hard to decipher. The book is copyrighted in 1996, and shares the same artistic style of the 90s as Rugrats. I don't know if little kids would also have trouble understanding the images, but with my poor eyesight I decided there was another book to be presented.

This left me with my fourth and final book, but...that's a blog for another day!
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