Reviewed by Nicole Sande, counselor at my school:

This book was a bit dry until the end. The author focused on four teenage girls but the book had several characters. The perspectives kept changing which made it really difficult to follow. Once I finally grasped the four characters, I felt the book ended. There wasn’t much character development. The author also wrote a lot of the quotes in a dialect from the Bahamian culture and some slang was used making it difficult to understand what was being said. I had to reread several pages for a better understanding. I even found myself skipping paragraphs and pages that felt irrelevant just to get to the end. This story could be told in 200 instead of 400 pages. The story itself wasn’t bad. I just felt like you were following some normal teenage drama. It felt like four different stories being forced into one and trying to make a story interesting that really wasn’t. Readers will be drawn to the cover and the Bahamas setting but overall it is a coming-of-age book with many of life’s challenges that some students may connect with but is an additional purchase.

Written by acclaimed author and Constitutional law scholar Lawrence Goldstone, Separate No More beings with the landmark Supreme Court’s decison of Plessy v. Ferguson and leads up through the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. Goldstone outlines how Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine, and how the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka unanimous Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Goldstone explains how Brown v. Board of Education served as one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all.

Separate No More introduces the reader to icons of racial justice from Brooker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois whose exacting work finally culminated in the Topeka case. In between, Goldstone introduces the reader to major events in the struggle including the Springfield, Illinois massacre of 1908, the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACPA) in 1909, the Red Summer race riots in 1919, and the Student Revolt of 1951.

As with other non-fiction books by Goldstone in my library’s collection, including Unpunished Murder: Massacre at Colfax and the Quest for Justice, and Stolen Justice: The Struggle for African American Voting Rights, Separate No More includes substantial source notes, bibliography, photograph and illustration credits (there are many primary sources in this book), and index.

This book would make an excellent addition to a high school library’s non-fiction collection.

It’s a good book for helping kids think about and talk about and process their reactions to the world around them. It’s about a kid having a rough day. From the moment he woke up late, everything seems to go wrong all day long, and as he describes how the day is going, he also describes how he feels, and how those feelings build. At the beginning, he makes a conscious decision to walk to school with his head up even though he feels a little scrunch, because he knows any day can be a good day if you try. But as more problems pile up, his bad day face slips out, even though he’s trying not to let it. He reminds himself that his principal would tell him to keep his head up, so he does, but eventually he has a meltdown. When he’s sent to the principal’s office, he expects her face to be scrunchy, but it’s not. When his parents come to get him, he asks if this day is going to get any better, and his mom says it might, if asks him what he can do if it doesn’t, and he knows the right answer is to keep his head up, but he confesses that he doesn’t really want to, and his principal says he just has to want to try. I like that it’s a very believable, and relatable tale for a lot of kids, and it doesn’t offer a sugar-coated ending that everything’s turned around or he has overcome his feelings. I like that it reminds kids they just have to want to try. The illustrations are full of feeling, too, that support the story nicely.

Well, it is pretty much exactly as the title describes: an old codger opens the book by complaining that the train is late, and then he proceeds to continuously complain about absolutely everything. Luckily the ostrich/emu? taking tickets has a never ending supply of patience as he continuously adjusts things in an attempt to accommodate Mr. Complain. In the end, the train goes through a loop-de-loop that delights Mr. Complain so much he doesn’t want to get off when it reaches his destination. The pictures are cute, and it does invite a certain amount of interaction with the reader, but I guess I don’t have as much patience as our ticket-taker, because I just found it rather pointless. It’s not bad. It’s just not that great.

It’s one of those books for reminding children that they are loved unconditionally. Mama cow is telling her little cow how much she loves it, when she loves it, and what she loves about it, and to keep it silly instead of sappy, it plays on “moo”s throughout. She loves it no matter it’s moo-d, when they’re grooving to moo-sic, and when it’s sch-moo-zing with friends, etc. No child can be told too often how much they’re loved.

It’s the kind of book that invites children in to spend time with it. The illustrations are so full of small detail with lots happening on each two-page spread. The story is a simple one, that of a gnome child who is disappointed to be told he s/he won’t be starting kindergarten for another year, so s/he sets off to spend the first day of school visiting all the forest animals in their different schools, watching how their school day progresses. Each two-page spread shows a cross-section of another school, full of details (both pictorial and small word blurbs) showing all that’s happening at the mouse school, the bunny school, the hedgehog school, etc. At the end of the day Pom returns home to tell Momo about all that s/he is looking forward to in Kindergarten, and Momo asserts she will be right there waiting to hear about those adventures. The one editorial adjustment I would have wished for was more distinction in the font between the paragraphs on each page that tell the through story and the blurbs that share the details. The reader is unlikely to read all the words on every page every time they peruse the book, but for read-aloud purposes, it would be better if the continuing story stood out a little better, as it sometimes gets lost among all the other words on the pages.

It’s a sweet story, told mostly in pictures, with limited, repeated text. When a young bear asks his mom to make blueberry cake, she points out that they need blueberries. He sets out very excitedly and finds and picks and eats blueberries, until he is distracted by a butterfly to a field of flowers, which he picks to fill his bucket. Upon returning home, he asks his mom again about blueberry cake, but when she asks again about blueberries, he has only flowers to offer. The next morning he rises early, picks blueberries, and leaves the bucket full for his mother to find, and they enjoy their blueberry cake together alongside a beautiful bouquet, until he asks about applesauce… Its simplicity makes it great for emergent readers, and in particular, the way the same words are used with varying punctuation makes it great for teaching about punctuation and context as clues for reading with expression.

I love the illustrations in this book: they are bright and beautiful and full of feeling. And I love the idea/purpose guiding the book: it’s about being comfortable in your own skin and not body shaming ourselves. I just didn’t like the story as much as I wanted to: it came across as rather preachy and pedantic. It is about a young Bangladeshi-American girl who is excited and confident about starting school for the first time, but is questioning comments she hears her family members make about their weight. At school she hears a boy tease another girl about looking fat. That night at dinner she puts all the pieces together and declares herself on a diet, turning down her favorite dinner. Her family gathers around her and explain their own mistaken thinkings and her mother tells her that “beauty is how you make people feel and the kind things you do,” and then all is right with the world again. I just wish it had been more subtle with more story and less preaching. It’s an important message, but it was delivered in too heavily handed a manner.