“Do you have any book recommendations for my child?”
This is a question I’ve been asked more times than I can count, and it’s one I don’t always find easy to answer—even though I feel like I should. As an author and publisher of Middle Grade and Young Adult literature, I wish I had an easy rubric to determine what is true, beautiful, and good in all the books that have ever been published. But the truth is that although I feel confident recommending the books that I love—confident about what is good in those stories for the young readers who might wander into their pages—the world of publishing is too vast and families too diverse in their tastes, tolerances, and perspectives for me to know what will land as a good recommendation every time.
My own perspective is too limited and lacking in diversity even to scratch the surface of all that is worthy of recommendation to parents seeking books for their kids. The same could be said of any of us, individually, because…
