I have what appears to be terrible news. The winner of this year’s Best New First Day of School Book Award, A Letter to My Teacher by Deborah Hopkinson, is different from its three glorious predecessors, Edda; Steve, Raised by Wolves; and Sophie’s Squash Goes to School.
At first this idea of difference appalls us. We want, like nervous schoolchildren, a comforting and familiar continuance, a benign recurrence of established themes. Yet it cannot be. For in our inclination to stasis we are betraying the very lessons of First Day of School books, a dark irony if there ever was one. Change must be. Stasis is itself a negative agent of change, it deforms the very thing of value we wish to preserve from change. The first day of school is all about transforming expectations, anxiety, and knowledge into a multi layered learning experience, how can we pervert its intrinsic character by expecting well trodden genre tropes from First Day of School books?
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Young adult book trends often start out like an unlooked for thunderstorm, a few sprinkles here and there and then the heavens open. One new trend we’ve noticed at DDG are book titles featuring little more than a preposition modifying a personal pronoun. Though there were earlier titles, such as This Is What I Did, by Anne Dee Ellis, I trace this trend back to the success of Gail Forman’s If I Stay. It began to pick up steam with titles like We All Looked Up, by Tommy Wallach. A quick perusal of our Upper and Lower YA sections indicated that the deluge is upon us.
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In these challenging days, any positive action we can take feels fundamental, essential. The overwhelming tide of events we have little control over is helped only by doing whatever we can, however small, however local, to make things a little better near us. On Thursday evening, August 17, we were all still reeling from the terrible attack in Charlottesville and the escalating nuclear threats and counter-threats, so were grateful to have something inspiring to look forward to: an event with award-winning nonfiction author, Tanya Lee Stone, presenting a partial screening of the Girl Rising documentary and her book, Girl Rising: Changing the World, One Girl at a Time. The event was a fundraiser for Vermont Works for Women, a local organization dedicated to improving the lives of girls and women in our state by providing education, programming, and advocacy to create economic equality and opportunity.

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This week teachers in Asheville go back to school, with students joining them next week. To welcome them back, we’re hand-delivering goody bags filled with coupons, bookmarks, freebies from some of our neighboring businesses, and invitations to an Educator Mixer at the bookstore in September.

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Last week, fellow ShelfTalker Leslie Hawkins wrote a compelling piece on talking to kids about racism directly so that they can see it and name it and react to it. She pointed to Holly McGhee’s Come with Me as a title designed to help kids engage with tough topics and figure out what they can do. I completely agree and think that books that depict kids finding ways to push back against hatred and racism and bias can be especially impactful—books like The Story of Ruby Bridges, Emmanuel’s Dream, Separate Is Never Equal, We’ve Got a Job. But as Grace Lin reminded everyone in a PBS video last week, there are plenty of books that introduce racism but don’t call it by name, and some of those books come labeled with the word “classic.” It’s embedded racism in bestselling, famous stories that we can’t afford to gloss over with young readers, even if it’s tempting to keep turning the pages to get back to the fun parts.

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Even old-school nature documentaries struggled with identifying what set human beings apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. The narrator would begin by declaring “man, the tool maker.” Tool making, we understood, set us apart. And yet as the documentary progressed a chimpanzee would be filmed turning a leaf into a funnel and using it to extract ants from a tree. Unmistakable tool making, We were dished! Or were we?
The issue remained ambiguous and yet I believe that old idea was onto something. We are as imposed upon by biological imperatives as any other mammal, to be sure. We are capable of the same level of reflexive and sustained prejudice and violence as that exhibited by a group of territorial weasels. It is not physical tools which make us our best selves but rather the creation of intellectual constructs, tools of the mind such as the First Amendment, and  adherence to principles such as non-violence and critical discourse, which elevate us over a state of nature.
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As the school year begins, so do the myriad of events hosted by PTAs, sports teams, service clubs and groups. Customers (and people claiming to be regular customers) approach the counter daily with a single typed sheet on letterhead extended before them like a foam play sword, requesting donations for auctions, raffles, back-to-school nights and festivals. We are happy to be included, of course, in their planning, but sometimes the sheer volume of requests is difficult to accommodate. While the soliciting volunteer often asks for “just anything, really” to fill their basket, we are torn between wanting to empty our “slightly damaged” shelf in the stock room and the potential marketing opportunity of an event — it IS our reputation we’re sending with our brochure and donation, and shabby or shopworn merchandise is just not quite the impression we were hoping to achieve.
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In the aftermath of the horrific white nationalist gathering in Charlottesville, I’ve heard and read some very pointed (and on point) feedback about the well-meaning platitudes that follow such events. Being who I am and doing what I do, I’m trying to absorb this feedback and learn from it, especially concerning how the children’s book community and others who influence kids can do better.
One hard truth we have to face is that, as much as we want to think that “this is not us,” that this is not who our country is, we aren’t going to change anything until we all accept that racism is alive and well and confront it head on. When it comes to what we teach our kids, maybe messages in books and songs and classrooms about how we’re all the same just aren’t enough. We, as a country, aren’t going to just “age out” of racism. I’ve been guilty of that assumption myself, noticing how white parents today are much less resistant to (even actively looking for) books featuring non-white characters compared to what I saw when I opened my bookstore 12 years ago. Yeah, it’s maybe getting better in my tiny little privileged corner of the universe. But out there in big wide world, not much has changed. As someone pointed out today, a lot of the neo-Nazis in that Charlottesville mob looked pretty young.
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