Title: Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre
Author: Carole Boston Weatherford (illustrated by Floyd Cooper)
Year published: 2021
Category: Children's historical nonfiction
Pages: 32 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2022 Google Reading map): USA (OK)
Summary:
Winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards for Author and Illustrator
A Caldecott Honor Book
A Sibert Honor Book
Longlisted for the National Book Award
A Kirkus Prize Finalist
A Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book
Celebrated author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrator Floyd Cooper provide a powerful look at the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation's history. The book traces the history of African Americans in Tulsa's Greenwood district and chronicles the devastation that occurred in 1921 when a white mob attacked the Black community.
News of what happened was largely suppressed, and no official investigation occurred for seventy-five years. This picture book sensitively introduces young readers to this tragedy and concludes with a call for a better future.
Review: This is the first YMA Award winner that I have read this year (I read a few of them last year) and I am impressed.
This book takes a difficult topic, which has been much in the news over the past couple of years and distills it down for young children so that they can fully understand the issues and the history. It is told in a straightforward way and the illustrations are fantastic. I can see why both the author and the illustrator won the Coretta Scott King Book Awards for 2021!
Challenges for which this counts:
- Alphabet Soup (Title)--U
- Nonfiction--Social History
- Pop Sugar--Read it in one sitting
- YMA--Coretta Scott King Author Award and Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award
No comments
Post a Comment