This book is about a girl who learns to accept her skin tone and ends up being proud about it. She sings songs about her color and sings them with pride. Ages 6-8. Source Pierce College Library. ( )

In my opinion, this book has a good idea behind it but it could be improved a lot. First, I really like the writing in this story. The physical structure of the paragraphs differ with every page, which makes it so some parts of sentences are emphasized more than others. There are random indents placed along the pages which is unconventional and matches sort of the unconventional idea behind this book.However, I really don't like the illustrations in this book. I think they don't match the writing of the book what-so-ever. They are really simple and well put together which is unlike the writing. I also don't like how this book has no plot. The whole entire story tells stories of different aspects of being black and being proud of that, but there are no problems and solutions anywhere. The main idea of this story is to be proud of being black and what it means to be black. ( )

i love that this book teaches people of color to embrace their color and to associate that with a positive image.

I had mixed feelings about this book after reading it. I liked the message of the story. The big idea is that African American heritage should be something you take pride in, and something that students of color learn at a young age. However, the great message of this book was ruined by the poor articulation. This book was written in poem form, and some of the language makes it very confusing. For example, one of the poems reads like this, “ a b, c ok, a b, I’m smart today, a b, wish I may, who say, smart today..”. To begin, the way the words are arranged is puzzling. It took me a few times of reading it to realize that the lines “a b” and “c ok” should be read as A, B, C ok. Additionally, these poems take a lot of reading between the lines to gather meaning, because they are so abstract. There were some poems that I had to read multiple times just to understand. For that reason, I don’t think this book would be useful to children. I would not use this in my classroom, which is unfortunate because the message is nice, but the presentation is horrible. The illustrations were not great either. They were very simple, and did not enhance the text. For example, for the poem I previously quoted above (a b, c ok..) the picture on the adjacent page is of a woman holding a little boy’s hand. That photo does not help us gather any additional meaning to the text, so therefore doesn’t serve the correct purpose.

An older sister teaches her younger brother about what being black is and how they must grow up strong and proud of whom they are through poetic rhymes. Great for preschool/schoolage