BLACK GIRL RISING

A rhyming picture book highlighting Black girls thriving.

Questions that highlight the upward and forward movement of Black girls are interspersed with sentences that at first seem like admonitions until it becomes clear that they are emphasizing the strength and beauty of the book’s subject. Lines like “You’d better keep quiet; keep still. / So you can know your place” echo social expectations that Black girls shouldn’t be loud and take up space. But Barnes goes on to assert that Black girls’ very existence is a testament to the power of the multihued and broad diaspora of Black people everywhere (“You’re supposed to dim your light / and never be seen. // But you don’t, girl—you won’t, girl— / you know you’re a queen”). Barnes stresses that Black girls have inherited the legacies of Toni Morrison, Mari Evans, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston, among others, and each illustration is a celebration of this fact. The book begins and ends with Black girls literally rising into the air, on tiptoes and with wings. Black girls using wheelchairs, Black girls wearing hijabs, Black girls embracing each other, wrapped by rainbows—they are all represented in vibrant, lightly textured oil and acrylic paintings. Every page turn brings more brilliant images that encourage readers to move at a steady, rhythmic pace through the book. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Proof that Black girls, just by being themselves, stay ready to soar.