Early Readers: Viola Desmond: A hero for us all by Sarah Howden, illustrated by Nick Craine

 I've been looking for more early reader nonfiction, especially biographies. This isn't an area I've collected much in the past, but I have a lot of teachers looking for it this year - they have students up through third and fourth grade who are struggling to read and are looking for hi-lo easy readers.

The first thing to be aware of is that this story is set in Canada. The framing story for this brief vignette is a Black girl given a ten-dollar bill by her grandmother. Her grandmother points out the person on the bill - Viola Desmond - and tells her granddaughter the story. In Nova Scotia in the 1940s, Viola Desmond was stranded when her car broke down and decided to visit a movie theater to pass the time while it was prepared. However, although she paid for a front-row seat, the manager insisted she sit in the segregated balcony. Desmond refused and was arrested. After a night in jail, she returned home and gathered friends and activists to fight against segregation. The granddaughter is moved by the story and determined that she too will be brave like Viola Desmond.

On the one hand, this is an interesting person I'd never heard of before. It's challenging but not too difficult, a level K on the Fountas and Pinnell system. On the other hand, the art is uninspired, showing the nameless granddaughter nearly as tall as her grandmother, wearing a clunky pair of headphones. While the text is necessarily brief, there's just so little context for what's happening that the book is unlikely to inform or interest readers on its own.

If a teacher is doing a unit on civil rights and needs lower-level reading material for struggling students, this would be a good choice in the context of that class. However, for a public library or for general reading, I think it's better for my audience to stick to familiar figures like Rosa Parks since they are still developing fluency in reading rather than reading for information.

Verdict: Although possibly useful for a school, I don't see a place for this in my public library. I would like to see a book for older readers on Viola Desmond and civil rights/segregation in Canada with more context and information though.

ISBN: 9781544448930; Published 2020 by HarperCollins; Borrowed from another library in my consortium