2025
This is a curated collection of articles, essays and blog posts almost all produced by Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor. A Foreword is provided by Patrtice Lawrence. A bibliography at the end of the book takes up twelve pages. A detailed introduction tells us a little about how the book is meant to work and what its ethos is. This is followed by a useful discussion of the terms used: racially minoritised, Black, BAME, BME, People of Colour and Ethnicity.
The central premise of this book is that children who belong to the groups described above deserve to be able to read about people who look like them. Chetty and Sands-O’Conner go beyond this group, however. They also look at literature that includes the classical portrayal of such groups, dehumanisation through anthropomorphism, characters form the former colonies and Black, Jewish, Asian, African and LBTQ+ children.
The majority of the articles are form Books for Keeps and Sands-O’Connor’s blog The Race to Read though there are a few from other publications and by other writers. It is certainly refreshing to see a blog being taken seriously and deemed a useful resource.
The cover says it all: white middle class classical characters enjoy a garden very similar to the one at Misselthwaite Manor, created by Frances Hodgson Burnett (the Secret Garden, 1911) whilst the characters defined at the beginning of the book – and a few others - labour outside, try to get into the garden and protest that ‘Representation Matters’.
This book is very readable even for the lay person as each article is short and written in plain English.
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