Amazing Faces

Review
By Richie's Picks

We in the library world so often speak of the importance of children getting to see themselves in the books to which they have access. And this is one of the things that Amazing Faces does so amazingly well. It is a collection in which diverse young readers will see themselves — both in the poems and the pictures — amidst the rainbow of cultures and skin colors found here. . . . Inclusion and exclusion is another thing of which we often speak. It was just the other day that I was talking to student teachers about familiarizing themselves with Teaching Tolerance’s Mix It Up at Lunch Day which, this year, will take place on November 9th. I was explaining what none of these young teachers-in-training can yet fully grasp — how one can be as old as me and still so clearly feel the sting of being excluded decades earlier. And how the slights I suffered are so inconsequential in comparison to what far too many twenty-first century young people still experience — particularly in today’s economic climate — despite it’s being so many decades beyond Martin and Cesar. This is another forever-a-problem that this collection will help address, and I am confident that if it is made available to young readers, Amazing Faces will be responsible for many a young reader ‘getting it.’ — Richie’s Picks