May 27, 2021
Here we round up new and forthcoming children’s titles including stories of private school drama, a raccoon’s dumpster finds, a girl and her busy parents, a picture book biography of a pivotal painter, and many more.
Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé. Feiwel and Friends, $18.99; ISBN 978-1-250-80081-7. An anonymous texter known as Aces reveals secrets about an elite private school’s only two Black students in this bracing debut that explores systemic oppression in predominantly white institutions. The YA novel earned a starred review from
PW.
Are You a Cheeseburger? by Monica Arnaldo. HarperCollins/Tegen, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-06-300394-1. In this picture book, while foraging in a garbage can, a raccoon named Grub meets glowing green Seed, who has bright black eyes and a knowing smile. Seed, who is hoping to get planted, isn’t in a hurry to dissuade Grub of the notion that Seed could eventually grow into his favorite food, a “very good and
Illustration by Ryan Garcia.
President Trump has left the building. In his final days, in one of the most symbolic moments of his short period in the White House, after his supporters had haphazardly stormed the Capitol Building on January 6, the inveterate (ab)user of social media was banned from, first, Facebook and then his favourite platform, Twitter. For the farthest right in North America, digital platforms’ decision to ban Trump represented the fulfilment of fears of “socialist” censorship; everyone else saw the enormous drop in the spread of misinformation and hate speech across the entire social media ecology. But this moment was more than simply symbolic. Donald Trump, although by this stage the lamest of lame duck presidents, was still the president of the most powerful state in the world, and yet system administrators working for platform corporations could cut off his main lines of communication to his supporters and, indeed, to the American people more broadly.