Reddit mentions: The best kids multicultural literature books

When I was teaching, I kept these in my classroom library. Not all have an overt vegetarian message, but they are all wonderful books that address vegetarian ideas.

She's Wearing a Dead Bird on her Head! Beautiful watercolor book about women fighting against the popular use of feathers for fashion. Covers some women's suffrage history and the founding of the Audubon Society. I used this one with 5th graders studying American history.

Of course, Horton Hears a Who. The message of this book resonates with kids' and preteens' experience being small and unheard: "A [being's] a [being], no matter how small." Most kids also relate to the feeling of believing in an idea that others dismiss. Horton's steadfastness is a great quality for veg kids to learn.

The Desert is Theirs by Byrd Baylor. Buy all of her books, for real. They're literal pieces of art, and each one has a message that kids sorely need, without preaching. Also, Everybody Needs a Rock is one of my all time favorites.

Hey, Little Ant As a boy is about to squish an ant, it begins to reason with him. The book ends by asking the reader what they would do. Cute and discussion-worthy story for younger readers.

The Story of Jumping Mouse My favorite children's book of all time! Empathy until you're bawling. This book is wonderfully illustrated and I cried every time I read it. It's a bit long - I used it for 3rd grade and up.

For nonfiction science/animal books, I can't say enough about the authors Gail Gibbons (for younger readers) and Seymour Simon (for older kids). They both are very good at presenting facts about animals that preserve the animals' interests.

Miss Rumphuis Beautiful book with the lesson of leaving the world a more beautiful place.

If you're wanting to learn more about feminism, I highly recommend reading bell hooks, especially Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. It's short and a super accessible view on various topics related to feminism. She's a very prolific writer, and she's written on lots of different topics related to teaching, race, and gender.

Audre Lorde is one of my favorite writers, and her book Sister Outsider is a collection of essays and speeches she's written about race, gender, sexuality, and so much more. She described herself as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," and I find her work to be powerful and beautiful.

Gloria Anzaldua is another of my favorite writers, and her The Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a collection of autobiographical essays and poems. She plays with language, and she wants to make people a bit uncomfortable and to question history. She edited an anthology of essays, poems, and other work by women of color called This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color.

I found this list that someone created, and I really like this list. It includes tons of films and books that I've watched or read. They included tv shows and music in the list as well.

Uma Narayan is one of my favorite feminist scholars. In her book, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Women, she challenges how Western feminists look at issues in other countries. This text is definitely more theory heavy than the others I've suggested.

Dean Spade is a legal scholar, and most people familiar with him are familiar with his work around trans* legal issues. He tries to make this essays accessible, and he tries to focus on finding real world solutions to real world problem. One of my favorite essays is "Mutilating Gender" which is about his experiences attempting to get counseling and chest reconstruction surgery and the patterns he saw socially that made that difficult to accomplish. This text is also a bit theory heavy.

I'm a Women's Studies graduate student, and I teach an intro level Women's Studies course. My research is about representations of Third World women (primarily Indian women), and I look at book, films, and other products of pop culture. For my thesis, I'm examining cultural hybridity in a film, Sita Sings the Blues, and a graphic novel, Sita's Ramayana. If you have a more specific idea of what you want to learn more about, and if you're willing to read some dense, theoretical stuff, I could give you more suggestions for texts or scholars to check out.

conviviality. Because I've been obsessed with fairy tales for about as long as I've been alive, but I never ever owned a nice book full of them! Plus, I'm sure there's some stories in here I've never read, which is just too exciting.

Thanks for the contest, you are awesome. Keep being awesome. Cheers!

[Kids, Family, Folklore] Elderberry Tales
Inspiring and engaging stories for kids, featuring ancient wisdom, timeless tales, and contemporary heroes.
https://www.elderberrytales.com/

Agasi Kidnaps Weensy

When Teensy comes home to find that his wife Weensy has been kidnapped by the giant Agasi, he sets out on a quest to rescue her. He receives help from the most unexpected set of companions - from a centipede, an egg, and many others! Enjoy this funny tale from the Sama people of the Philippines. 

"Agasi Kidnaps Weensy" is translated and published by Kauman Sama Online, an organization devoted to sharing Sama culture and language worldwide. Proceeds from the sale of this book will be used to print books in the Sama language for kids in the Philippines, as well as making more Sama Stories available to a wider audience.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07QX973BH/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Agasi Kidnaps Weensy is the first attempt of Kauman Sama Online to publish on Kindle. Therefore you can get it for FREE until Friday the 26th. It is a folk tale of the Sama people that was elicited in the 1960s and used with permission for the publishing of both a Sinama and an English book. It is a funny story of a mythological creature like that of a giant or an ogre who is known for taking people's wives. He does that to Weensy, the wife of Teensy both little people who are about the size of human hands. A whole slew of creatures, an egg, centipede, wasp, poop, needle, crocodile and more come to Teensy's aid. Agasi doesn't know what he has coming to him.

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Kindle Link: https://www.amazon.com/Agasi-Kidnaps-Weensy-Sama-Stories-ebook/dp/B07QX973BH/


I am more interested in building the Sinama language library than publishing books in English on Kindle, but this is one method that we believe professional standard books in the Sinama language can become self-sustaining. I could really use some positive reviews. I would like to advertise on BookBub, but no one has taken the time to give a good review. I hope you enjoy the book.

as /u/shafafa mentioned, library is a great source. We're reading Brigid's Cloak right now. The 200s are the Dewey decimal system for religion/mythology.

The way I introduced comparing these stories is something I like to call "Comparative Cinderology". Get a bunch of Cinderella stories: Disney Cinderella, Irish Cinderlad, Korean Cinderella, there's all sorts. They all exist to tell the story of an underdog who succeed due to a combination of good luck and virtue. They aren't true, they are just a convenient and memorable form to teach some form of morality. Which we may or may not agree with.

Hmm...books I liked as a kid...well, apparently they tended to involve animals, and mostly realistically drawn ones. Here's a few:

Good Dog, Carl.

Stellaluna.

The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses.

Fritz and the Beautiful Horses. I liked horses, what can I say.

How to Hide an Octopus. This one is fun because it shows you each animal and then you have to find it camouflaged in the environment. Very colorful, light on words, if I remember correctly.

The Story of Jumping Mouse. This one had just the slightest amount of creepy. But it was just the right amount I could handle, and it made the book kind of intriguing? I believe it's based on a Native American folk story.

Woah, this reminds me a lot of the artwork in Our Father's Godsaga. Especially the awesome picture of Fenrir.

Great picture! Thanks!

When I was little, my dad put together a bunch of books about Coyote, the trickster god, including my favorite. We used to read them together barefoot in bed, at my bedtime, because that's the best way to read a story. 😊

The Fairy Books of Andrew Lang. Bonus if you have a Kindle, these ones are free!

Blue

Red

Yellow

Olive

Lilac

Orange

Violet

Brown

Crimson

I've read a stack of king arthur stories over the years, and have yet to find retelling better than these:

• The book Stories of King Arthur and his knights by Barbara Picard (don't let the 'for kids' vibe put you off, this lady's a gifted storyteller).
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Stories-King-Arthur-His-Knights-ebook/dp/B01HA05V24/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?keywords=king+arthur+picard&qid=156970734
  
  
• The movie Excalibur
  
  
• Non fiction by Kevin Crossley-Holland
  
  
• The myths and legends podcast by Jason Weiser (some good Arthurian episodes)

I love books

and now I've gone and bought [the book the reviewer recommended]
(http://www.amazon.com/Our-Fathers-Godsaga-Retold-Young/dp/0595299784/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420472352&sr=1-5&keywords=you+should+buy+this+book+maybe). It looks awesome and I was sold by the reviews.

The Magic Horse of Han Gan -- Painted horse comes to life.

The Midnight Circus -- Mechanical horse comes to life.

Moonhorse -- Just beautiful illustrations of a magical horse visit.

The Carousel -- Merry-go-round horses come to life.

Silver Pony -- All pictures, no words -- a boy's dream world turns real with a magical horse.

The Mud Pony -- American Indian boy's mud pony comes to life.

I adore spiders, so it probably won't matter. But there would be an additional layer of squee if she resembled Baje Wihtethorne's idea of a spider-person.

Just got my copy in a few weeks ago from amazon, and I've got to say that I really enjoy it. If you haven't read Rydberg's Investigations Into Germanic Mythology then I'd highly recommend it as it would explain a lot of the interpretations. Don't get me wrong, I don't agree with a multitude of Rydberg's conclusions, but he does have some incredible insights that really caught me off-guard.

Here is the amazon link to the book, for those that are curious:

https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Kelpie-Picture-Kelpies/dp/178250253X

If you're looking for an intro, try Our Father's Godsaga by Viktor Rydberg. Other than that, you can't go wrong with the already mentioned one by Kevin Crossley-Holland.

Besides that, Dr. Jackson Crawford (Ph.D., Scandinavian Studies; Taught Old Norse, Norse myth, Sagas, Vikings, etc. at UCLA) is releasing a version of the Poetic Edda which is worth checking out. It's available for Pre-Order here

I've kept searching, and I think it might be K.Y. Craft or Ruth Sanderson. Maybe The Twelve Dancing Princesses. I can't find many pictures of the illustrations online, so I'm going to try to find them in a bookstore or library so I can see them in person.

Anansi (Rabbit Ears We All Have Tales)?

Is this it?

https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Eggs-Robert-San-Souci/dp/0803706197

The Talking Eggs?

The Talking Eggs (1989) ?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0689843046?fp=1&pc_redir=T1?

Rabbit and the Moon by Douglas Wood?

Turtle Knows Your Name by Ashley Bryan. The names are "Upsilimana Tumpalerado" and "Mapaseedo Jackalindy Eye Pie Tackarindy"

After a bit of googling, I believe I may have found the book you're thinking of:

https://www.amazon.com/Traveling-Tondo-Nkundo-Dragonfly-Paperback/dp/067985309X

Might it be The Mud Pony

I remember reading a similar book. Is this it? http://www.amazon.com/Mud-Pony-Reading-Rainbow-Books/dp/0590415263

I haven't read it myself, but it's Gaiman, so no way you can go wrong:

Odd and the Frost Giants