Episode 4: What Should We Read Instead of Little House?

episode 4
Written By Amy Sharony

What do you do when you discover that a book you grew up loving isn’t the book you remembered? Luckily, there are so many great books now for middle and YA readers that you won’t have much trouble finding a replacement that you’re genuinely excited to share with your kids.

Here are links to all the stuff we recommend in this episode:

TRANSCRIPT

(Note: We use an automatic transcriber for our podcasts, and sometimes it makes weird errors — we do edit the transcript, but I’m sure we miss stuff!)

[00:00:09] Suzanne: Hello and welcome to the home.school.life.now podcast with Suzanne and Amy. I’m Suzanne. 

[00:00:16] Amy: And I’m Amy. 

[00:00:18] Suzanne: And this is episode number four of our newly relaunched podcast series recording on Thursday, August 10th, 2023. And by the way, you may notice that you’re not listening to this in August. So hello future.

I hope it’s nice there. I hope it’s slightly cooler. 

[00:00:40] Amy: Suzanne and I are in the middle of packing up the Academy to move to a bigger space, which we’re super excited about. So I’m envious of future Amy and Suzanne who might be listening to this and have already finished moving. 

[00:00:55] Suzanne: That’s right, but we did want to record a few episodes ahead of time.

Because it’s about to get crazy around here. So that’s why we are recording in august, but you will hear it a little bit later so yeah, so hello future. 

Today’s topic is what to read instead of — we have talked about this before we’ve talked about how it’s important to us to start reimagining the homeschool literary canon to better reflect the experiences of all people, not just white, cis, straight, middle class, men often, right?

And if you happen to be just joining us and haven’t heard us talk about the Little House problem on previous podcasts: Amy what is the Little House problem? What am I talking about? 

[00:01:52] Amy: First of all, I feel like there’s no one who has not heard me tell this story before. Yeah. I do tell this story a lot because for me it was like one of those, one of those sort of linchpin moments in my homeschool life where I was like, wow, I am gonna have to start looking at this completely differently.

I loved Little House as a kid. My mom made me sunbonnets and aprons to play in. I read the books over and over again. I read them so much that they would fall apart, and I would have to like tape the covers back on. I pretended to harvest things on the regular. Like I really loved Little House.

And so I could not wait to share the Little House series with my kids. I was so excited about it. It was one of the — when we started homeschooling, I think it was the first book that I went to the library and got out because I was so excited to read it with them. And we read Little House in the Big Woods and I didn’t notice any red flags.

And then we started the second book in the series, Little House on the Prairie. And if you have read as an adult, you probably are also horrified by how absolutely racist the book is. The racism against Indigenous people, the white entitlement, it’s really disturbing to read.

And my kids were noticing it. My daughter, who was only in second grade, was like, why do they hate Indians so much, Mama? So clearly this book that I had loved as a kid was it was not a book that I was going to be able to love as an adult. 

[00:03:32] Suzanne: Yeah. And it’s — what do we do with those books that —well, first of all, it feels like there’s a hole to fill.

And and we’re just trying to do a better job of talking about all different kinds of people. I — you and I have talked about this too — but I think a lot about when I started homeschooling, which is over 20 years ago now, I was like trying to think of being super progressive, right?

And what I wanted to avoid in my homeschooling experience was, the idea that there are girl books and there are boy books and girls read both boy and girl books, but boys only read boy books, right? So I tried to be really thoughtful and very balanced and to make sure that girls were reading boy books and boys were reading girl books, right?

We did Little Women. We did my favorite horse stories by Marguerite Henry, which not a lot of boys read when I was growing up. But what I did not think about was trying to get beyond the white middle class experience. In fact, we focused so much on books about white kids and white families that Kid No.3, later, when they were talking about what we read growing up, said it was all about, and I’m quoting here, “Frolicking British Children,” which I did not realize was a genre that was a favorite of mine. But yes, we read Narnia, we read, The books by E. Nesbit, right? We’ve read all these classic kind of fantasy stories that are all about white American or British kids.

And this is something that, going back to those classics, we just discover some of those issues. You talk about Little House, I talk about Peter Pan. Yeah, it is so hard because Peter Pan has some delightful language and it’s just, it’s so much more than the Disney adaptation. However, it is also horrifically racist.

And I didn’t remember that or even think about it until I was reading it aloud to my children. 

[00:05:47] Amy: I think that is that is a hard thing about having this conversation. I think for me, it is a hard thing because I don’t know — I’ve always thought of myself as a fairly progressive, thoughtful person.

And so being confronted with my own obliviousness to reality. I know I was a kid, and I’m not — but it’s been a hard journey sometimes seeing the way that this, seeing things that I loved turn out to be racist and like having to look at what that says about me as a person.

[00:06:21] Suzanne: It’s not about, it’s not about feeling guilty about loving these books. It’s just about thinking about them in a new context, right? And we revisit them and finding better alternatives. 

[00:06:33] Amy: And I will say, I think that I think we were both sort of homeschoolers who were inspired by The Well-Trained Mind, right?

We were inspired by this idea of classical homeschooling, and a big part of classical homeschooling for me — a big part of what I was excited about — was this idea of reading the classics with my kids. I was super excited to read the classics with my kids and Little House was a book that I thought of as a classic. The Narnia books were books that I thought of as a classic. 

But we’ve — the problem I think is that the way that we’ve always defined classics, or at least the way that we’ve defined in the 20th century classics, is very much from the perspective of the white patriarchy. And so a lot of the books that we think of as classic — it turns out that “classic” with quotation marks around it is a false construction. So it’s like a made up thing.

[00:07:30] Suzanne: Yeah. That’s about this one group of people. And, so there’s that issue. And then another issue that I did not — like I said, it’s not about feeling guilty, but this is something that I’d do in a different way if I was doing it over again, and I’m trying to do differently in our homeschool school.

One reason I didn’t do a great job of it is I didn’t have this kind of library of books that I had read growing up about characters that weren’t white, right? When I was growing up, the books that were available about Black people in America, for instance, typically they were all about like the horrors of slavery.

Which felt important and which is true, but it was not — I did not read those books for fun. I wasn’t pulling them off the shelves like I was pulling the Narnia books off or some of my other favorite series.

[00:08:21] Amy: Yeah, if you looked at the Scholastic — you got the Scholastic Book Order Form. 

[00:08:24] Suzanne: Oh, of course, we love the Scholastic Book Order Form.

[00:08:26] Amy: Okay, Scholastic Book Order Forms are the best. But if you got your Scholastic Book Order Form, every book that wasn’t about white middle class kids was about how people who weren’t white middle class kids had suffered and overcome their suffering or not overcome the suffering and died terribly.

They were hard, heavy, sad books. They weren’t bad books, but it was like the only experiences that not white, middle class, or wealthy people had were these terrible experiences. That was all that was worth reading about for them, was like their tragedies.

[00:09:04] Suzanne: I didn’t even realize how much I associated, say, middle school and YA novel with this suffering, with a book that was like good for you instead of fun to read, until I started — in the past 20 years, there has been this explosion of great books with non-white protagonists that are, they’re not all about — they’re adventure stories, they’re fantasy stories, they’re school stories, and the character happens to be Black or brown or an immigrant or Muslim or something different and that informs the character, but that’s not the point of the book.

The point is not here is a Black character and this is all the terrible things that happen. And I just don’t feel like those were around as much when I was growing up. And, now gosh, between, what, Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia, which is about a Black American boy having this fantasy world adventure; The City of the Plague God by Sarwat Chadda, about a Muslim character. Graphic novels like New Kid by Jerry Craft, which is a school story about starting a new school and making friends, and yes, what is it like as a Black student in a primarily white school, but it’s mostly just about growing up and having these regular kid adventures.

[00:10:28] Amy: Yeah, I think that is the thing, is that the classics, the books that we’re used to calling classics, are all about this kind of white, mostly male experience, right? It’s the books, all the riffs, the mythology are the books, the Greek and Roman mythology, that these kids would have grown up reading.

Yes. And so it’s, it feels really exciting and a brave new world to look at these different perspectives, but this is the same old world. It’s just, we’re actually seeing the whole world and not just this one little Greek and Roman corner of it. 

[00:11:02] Suzanne: Yes, I guess that’s the, I guess the great news is that there are so many books out there now that can, if I wanted to go through and if I was trying to be thoughtful and make up a reading list for my own family these days for read alouds, it would not be hard for me to swap out books with white protagonists and find books with Black and brown and other characters, LGBT characters having the kid adventures, right? It would not be challenging. So that’s something that you can do . You can add in all of these great new books, but really if we’re going back to the Little House problem, it’s: What books don’t deserve to be on the bookshelf anymore, even if we knew them, if we loved them, are they really — we have limited resources. We have a limited number of hours in the day, and we have to make choices. We can’t read everything as much as I would like to. 

So what, what doesn’t deserve to take up that space, and what can we pick as a better option? And, I think for Amy and I, we talk a lot about this. This is always an ongoing work. I couldn’t, I don’t know. I don’t remember that these books have problems until I revisit them. 

[00:12:20] Amy: I think that’s a really important piece of this, is that this is a work in progress. And you are going to make bad discoveries. As you do the work, you’re going to read a book, and you’re — like me with Little House — and you’re going to be like dang, this does not accurately reflect the experiences of native people in the 19th century. This doesn’t. It doesn’t accurately reflect the experiences of white “settlers,” which is a gross word, in the 19th century. This is basically Manifest Destiny fan fiction. 

[00:12:54] Suzanne: And it doesn’t reflect the values as a family that we want to hold up for ourselves and for our kids. And I think something else to be, certainly true for me, is that this is an emotional process also.

It is not neutral, right? It does not feel neutral to me to set aside a book that I loved because it’s super racist or whatever the problem is, right? It is emotional. 

[00:13:24] Amy: I think people who love books like they’re people, we have relationships with them and history with them and memories built around them.

And so it’s really hard to break up with a book that you love. 

[00:13:40] Suzanne: It really is. And I know for me, I can feel defensive. I can want to, Peter Pan, can we just read around the bad parts, right? Can we just maybe — let’s maybe not talk about them or we can address them. It’s — I have to think seriously about is that worth it, right?

What do I love about Peter Pan? I love some of the sparkling, dialogue, the way that the sentences and words are put together. You know what, there are a lot of great books out there that also play with language in similar ways that I find as delightful. That do not have this big piece of racist luggage, associated with it.

And it can be hard to say, you know what, we’re just not going to do that, we’re going to do something different. 

[00:14:32] Amy: And I think, though, that like part of it is that ultimately the experience of reading a book like that with your own kids is going to feel so different from the experience you had reading it as a kid, because I think you’re going to want to do a better job and you’re going to want to explain and you’re going to want to talk about it with your kids and it’s going to feel heavy and uncomfortable and it’s not — it shouldn’t be — the same like sparkly, fun, oh, this is lovely language experience. 

I think that it’s not going to be the same as it was when you read this book that you loved as a — this terrible racist book that you loved as a kid. And your kids are not going to feel the same way about it at all. They are not coming to this book with oh, I love this nostalgia, right?

The problematic stuff is very apparent to them. My daughter was so upset about Little House on the Prairie. 

[00:15:31] Suzanne: Or even just the limitations, the narrowness of the world view. My kid with frolicking British children — he didn’t say that as a positive, right? It’s maybe could we read about something that isn’t frolicking British children, right?

Which is just not something I had considered, because that’s not how I thought of those books. I thought of — yeah, you get used to thinking of these characters as the default characters, as white characters, as the default. 

[00:15:56] Amy: Because you have frolicking British boys and frolicking British girls.

[00:16:01] Suzanne: Look at me go. I did, and I think what’s great is to see that the kids that we are raising have a wider view of the world and that they notice this stuff in ways that we don’t even when we’re doing all this work. 

Yeah, so this is — why don’t you get deep breaths together as we let go of some of our books.

And what we wanted to do today was to give some specific recommendations for specific examples. Okay, to begin with, Amy, what should we read instead of Little House on the Prairie?

Gosh, I guess I know for me, the first thing that comes to mind is The Birchbark House series.

[00:16:43] Amy: I think that if you want a one for one replacement, if you’re like, what book series can I replace the Little House series with? This is it, right? The Birchbark House series. 

[00:16:54] Suzanne: Yeah, so the first book is The Birchbark House. It’s by Louise Erdrich, who you may know as a best selling, award winning novelist of books for adults.

And this series, based on kind of her own personal family history and culture, is about a young Ojibwe girl growing up near Lake Superior in the 1800s. So you have that same kind of family, daily life story. What was that like? The first book, The Birchbark House, she is, it’s in the 1800s, so obviously white colonization is there in the background.

But that’s not — that clash is not really front and center for her as a young girl growing up during this period, but you can read the series follows her as she grows up, and we read this in the junior high one year and a lot of kids just really — that’s part of the joy of Little House, right? Is seeing kids your own age and the difference in everyday life. And this is just a really great series. 

[00:18:01] Amy: It is. 

And I love that. I think it also fills like kind of the same. gap as Little House because as the books go on, the protagonist grows up, just like the main character in the Little House series does.

And so you get to see her world expanding around her, like it goes from her just being in her home and that being the center of everything to the bigger world around her. Which is nice. It’s nice to have a book character to grow up with. I think that’s really nice — For me as a kid, I loved that. 

Yes. I think that is the absolute best substitute for Little House. That’s the substitute that I would always recommend. But if you want a book that’s about the experience, seen through the eyes of a colonizer, seen through the eyes of, a citizen of the United States at the same time period.

I’m going to recommend the book Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park which she actually wrote as a response to Little House, which she grew up reading and which she says always made her feel — We were talking Suzanne, about what it’s like to read a book where the book doesn’t like you. Like this book, where you read a book and you’re like darn, this book hates me.

And I think that was the feeling that Park had about Little House. Yeah. So she wrote Prairie Lotus about a character like her. Her, the main character’s father is a United States citizen from Tennessee. Her mom, who’s passed away, is from China. She’s grown up in Los Angeles in the Chinese community there, but after her mother dies, she and her dad leave to go settle in La Forge in the Dakota Territory.

This takes place about 1880. So it’s a similar period to the Little House books, but it’s obviously a really different experience because this character is straddling two worlds, the sort of Chinese world of her mother’s family and the “American,” in quotation marks, world of her dad’s family, and she doesn’t really fit into either one because she’s both of them, but that makes her kind of neither of them.

And so I really appreciate that this book tackles the racism that not-white people would have experienced within the settler movement. A lot of books like Little House, a lot of stories make it seem like all of these, people were just like one big family, one big team trying to make the frontier happen. And it really wasn’t like that for everyone. It wasn’t like that maybe for most people. 

And so I love this book. It’s kid appropriate. It’s like a middle grades book. So it’s not a completely dark downer of a book, but I think it’s a much more realistic portrayal of what it was like to be part of the white colonizing force.

[00:20:57] Suzanne: Yeah. 

And I think for a lot of us, we did not get this perspective on history. When we were in, in school. It feels like I have, I know on my own, like I have a lot of reading to do to educate myself and catch up with, even the basics of westward expansion. Native American history, all this kind of stuff. 

[00:21:22] Amy: It’s pretty amazing. Another book that I recommend is maybe like a little bit of a stretch, and it’s not really what I would call a middle grades book. I think it’s more of a young adult, high school-y kind of book, even an adult book, but I think it is a great counterpoint to Little House on the Prairie.

It’s Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. Have you read that one? 

[00:21:47] Suzanne: I haven’t. 

It’s on my list. David Grann is amazing. Oh, and there’s gonna be an adaptation, or there is an adaptation. I don’t remember. 

[00:21:55] Amy: It is a spectacular story about the Osage people of Oklahoma in the early 1920s, they’ve been moved around and shuffled around, and in the 1920s, they find oil deposits, big oil deposits under their land. And for a minute, they become like the richest people in the world because these oil deposits will make them the richest people in the world, but, a lot of the sort of white colonizers in the area don’t like this, and so their goal is to get rid of the Osage people — basically by serial murdering, which I think is like a side of colonization. This is a very, this isn’t oh, we moved into your territory, oops. This is like a very deliberate attempt to wipe out a group of people for money. 

Which is what “Westward Expansion” really was. We want to paint it in rosier colors than that. And, maybe there’s some nuance there, but this story I think is great because there’s no nuance. It’s like clearly very bad, which feels appropriate. 

[00:23:05] Suzanne: This is the kind of nonfiction work that you could read also as a parent, right? To inform your own understanding — it’s maybe not reading that — you’re not reading this with your small child, of course, but again, this is the our shift in our own perspectives.

Those of us — like I said, I’ll speak for myself, white middle class, lady who did not learn what I should have learned about the history of my own country, and I don’t know, I feel like it’s important to have this kind of depth in my own knowledge, even if this is not something I’m discussing with young kids, right?

It’s all about education. And before we move on to the next one, I have to just give a shout out to Darcy Little Badger, who’s one of my favorite current YA authors. She is an American author. She has written Elatsoe and A Snake Falls to Earth. I think those are YA. Elatsoe, I think, is on the edge of YA.

These are contemporary novels about, there’s some supernatural element. Like we were talking before about just having — gosh, people who weren’t white starring as the protagonists in adventure stories and mystery stories and all this kind of stuff. And Darcy Little Badger’s books are amazing examples of this, so check her out.

[00:24:29] Amy: Maybe that is one of the best alternatives to Little House that we can even suggest, is that instead of reading Little House, you go and read some of the great work by Native authors that is coming out — historical fiction and contemporary fiction and fantasy and all kinds of really great work by Native authors that’s being published these days.

If you want an antidote to Little House, that might be it. 

[00:24:52] Suzanne: And you can support their career right now. You can go out and buy their book right now and get excited about the book that’s going to come out next. Yeah, that’s very cool. 

[00:25:01] Amy: So what other books, Suzanne, are we going to suggest that people might want to replace?

[00:25:06] Suzanne: Okay. Okay. I have to say I’m not going to talk a lot about it because I don’t think we need to give a lot of airspace to this, but we gotta talk about Harry Potter. 

Amy: Oh, amen. 

Suzanne: And this is, I will tell you, one of the stories — One of the moments that, that talked me into homeschooling was I was picturing myself sitting with my kids, reading aloud to them.

I will note that you don’t have to homeschool to read aloud to your children, but this was what came into my head. 

[00:25:34] Amy: I like that you always say that. 

[00:25:36] Suzanne: You don’t have to. That seems obvious to me in hindsight. But I just had these days of us sitting together in each other’s laps on the couch. And the series I was reading in my daydream was Harry Potter.

And, as it turns out, that is not something that I am reading or that I want on my bookshelf. Not just because I personally have two transgender kids, but just in general. So yeah, so what are some great, fun, magical school stories that we can read instead of the series that shall no longer be named?

[00:26:16] Amy: Okay the good news is that there are an embarrassment of riches of objects, right? There are so many great magical school books. So I’ll start: Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston. This is a fantastic series about a magical academy — a Black Atlanta girl, her brother has gone to join the super secret super secret magic school. She finds out after he’s been injured in a supernatural accident, so he’s in some kind of supernatural coma. And so she gets accepted into the school, and she goes, and she meets friends, and she finds enemies, and it’s a whole series.

And I cannot recommend it enough. So much fun. It’s effortlessly diverse. There’s a dragon. It’s everything that you want in Harry Potter without the icky transphobic stuff. 

[00:27:18] Suzanne: I I have got to shout out the Akata Witch series by Nnedi Okorafor. I love these books. I love this author so much. Akata Witch is about a Nigerian American girl who, after growing up in the United States, she and her family move back to Nigeria, which is a culture switch for her.

And as she, she lives there, she begins to realize she has some magical powers. She has a lot of similarities to The Series Who Will Not Be Named, right? She is a person who grew up in a non-magical context, discovering that side by side there has been this magical world all along. And she essentially joins, becomes — finds a teacher to show her all of the magic.

And she has a group. There’s a group of three or four of them, really close friends. There’s even a whole sports element to it. So this is really amazing. It is. It’s funny and fresh and interesting, and like I said it’s set in Nigeria and you can follow her and her friends as they age in the books that follow this first one in the series.

I love it. I love it. We read it one year in the junior high.

[00:28:44] Amy: Okay, so one more. I’ll do one more. I’m gonna recommend The Marvellers by Dhonielle Clayton.

Similarly, it’s — surprise, it’s about a magic school! But it’s actually a really interesting setup because there’s traditional magic and there’s this other kind of magic, called conjurer magic, which is associated with Black and brown magic traditions in this world, right? And the protagonist of the book is the first conjurer magician to attend, to be accepted to, this elite magic school.

Previously, they’ve been excluded from it. And, as usual, drama ensues, there’s a big bad evil, people suspect the protagonist of being in league with him because she is, of course, a conjurer, she’s different from everybody else, so she’s trying to figure out a way to figure out where she fits in, and to figure out, like, how to take control of her magic, and she makes friends, and fights evil, and — spoilers — saves the day, or at least starts to save the day in this first book.

So I think The Marvellers is really fun. I recommend it highly. Yeah, fun book. Magic school books are so fun. J. K. Rowling gets messed up bad, because there are so many good replacements for Harry Potter. We do not buy Harry Potter. 

[00:30:08] Suzanne: I think we’re actually in a prime area for this, because there are a lot of People who grew up loving that series, and people, very diverse people, people, LGBT people, all these people who really found a lot to love in that series before the author was revealed as such a hateful person, and they are now old enough to write their own magic school books. 

As we’ve said before, it’s an embarrassment of riches. You can go, you can even Google, what should we read instead of Harry Potter? You can find characters, where the protagonists are transgender. It’s not great that, that, we have to — I feel like I have to take these books off my shelves — but, there’s a lot of really great stuff out there.

[00:30:56] Amy: Originally, it felt like you could just not buy books new. You could buy Harry Potter at a used bookstore, and it would be fine. But then, when you go back and reread it, I think it feels icky. I think there are a lot of things in the book that, once you’re in the mindset of looking at them more critically, that feel icky.

[00:31:18] Suzanne: It’s very true. There’s definitely stuff that I was kinda like I don’t love that the first time through, but now it’s that is my main emotion. 

[00:31:28] Amy: Oh, but these are great alternatives to Harry Potter. Great alternatives. You can definitely curl up in a chair with your children and read them these books, whether you homeschool or not.

[00:31:37] Suzanne: I was gonna say you don’t even have to homeschool to do it. All right.

And so our last one today that we’ve got is I wanted to talk a little bit about To Kill a Mockingbird and good one yeah, I feel like this is a little bit of a different category because I don’t think we need to throw out this book the same way that I might throw out Harry Potter or Little House, right?

I feel like To Kill a Mockingbird is an amazing coming of age story. It’s well written, it is entertaining to read, there’s a lot of great stuff in there. However, for the past however long, since it’s been published, really, it has been held up as the great American antiracist story, and I don’t think it should have that type of title.

[00:32:39] Amy: It fails that. What is Atticus Finch’s antiracist perspective — that we shouldn’t just kill people? 

[00:32:48] Suzanne: Yeah, lynching is bad, I think is, and it’s — we’ve got the white savior issues and it focuses on the white — it’s just not, it’s just not what it’s been held up.

[00:32:58] Amy: I actually agree with you that it is a great story, it is a fantastic coming of age story. And if we read it like that, it’s totally worth reading, read it with other great coming of age stories. 

[00:33:11] Suzanne: But if you want to read some stories that explore the racist history of the United States, and that are antiracist, I think we need to look at some new alternatives. And the first one that comes up for me is Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor.

This is the first book in her Logan family series. It is about a Black American family in Mississippi during the depression, and yes, it is a tough hang at times. This family, and their neighbors and friends are dealing with violent racism. They are dealing with terroristic threats. And violence, and murder from groups like the KKK, and all of this.

So it is a tough read at times, but what I love about the book, and what — I’ve read it several times — when I come back to it, is the picture it paints of this family, of this Black, that is the the Logan family, what they have done to stay together. They’re great characters and I’m just so interested, and they are at the center of the story, as they should, so that, that is the one I always recommend.

Like I said, you want to be aware that this is something — I don’t know that I’d do as a read aloud because I think it might be really hard, so you might want to — if you haven’t read it, maybe read this one so you can think about when your kids are ready for something like this. 

[00:34:43] Amy: And I think To Kill a Mockingbird is not a particularly light.

[00:34:50] Suzanne: No, and it’s also not for little kids. People read it at very young ages. And it’s not really a little kid’s story. Even though the protagonist is a little kid. 

[00:35:02] Amy: Okay, so instead of To Kill a Mockingbird, I think a good substitute would be The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. A lot of people have probably heard about this one.

It is about a young girl, a teenage girl who goes to an elite private school. One night she goes to a party with a friend from her old neighborhood, he ends up getting shot by the police, and it, it’s obviously a very upsetting situation. She gets shot while she’s with him, and then she has to figure out how to navigate this.

It turns out that the police, shockingly, may not have acted in the best way. And she’s afraid and it changes the way that she sees herself and the world that she lives in and the way that she straddles these two worlds. Again, it’s not a light book. It’s not an easy book to read. It’s definitely like a challenging book.

But I think that it is antiracist in a lot of really important ways. Again, centering the Black experience, centering the Black protagonist, and being really transparent about some of the struggles that Black people face with the police, which I think is something that we should probably be talking about more.

[00:36:25] Suzanne: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s a great YA novel. Yeah, um, so if you’re looking for something, you’re like, okay what about my — if you’re looking for something maybe a little bit more middle grade, maybe a bit — lighter is not really the word that I want, but something less heavy. Yeah, that’s less heavy. 

I love One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams Garcia. This is the first book in a trilogy — this is about three sisters, young girls, who are sent to live with their estranged mother in California. They are, they’re Black. I think I think they started out in New York. I think they currently are living with their father and their grandmother in New York. And one summer, they are sent to live with their mother in California. 

And this is 1968. And their mom has gotten involved with the Black Panther Movement. This is really a family story. It is really a story about the relationship between the sisters and the relationship between their mom who had left the family and what relationship did they want with her and what can they have with her.

But it is set against this backdrop of the Black Panther Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. And I think this is a great I love all the books in the series. I would read — if she kept writing them, I want to follow these three sisters. I would follow them all the way to adulthood and marriage and having grandkids.

They are delightful to spend time with. And it’s just really a great book to hand kids to — again, you’re keeping that, that backdrop of racial justice. 

[00:38:11] Amy: And I know this is off topic, but can we just agree that the Black Panthers are the best? 

[00:38:18] Suzanne: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. They’re amazing. If you have not, again, if you grew up in school like I did, where we barely touched on the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King was framed as the “good” civil rights, and Malcolm X and the Black Panther were this scary, oh my gosh, it was terrible, right? The history that I grew up with. If you have not gone back to re examine that and learn about these amazing people, you’re going to want to do that because these stories are often infuriating, but also amazing.

[00:38:58] Amy: Yeah, this book is actually a great springboard for that. One Crazy Summer is actually a great springboard for talking about the Black Panthers or studying the Black Panthers. 

[00:39:07] Suzanne: I think this would be a great readaloud. We’ve read it in the junior high. I think it would also be a great read aloud.

So we are just scratching the surface. We are just trying to throw some stuff out there and help folks get started. So I think this is going to need to be like part one of an ongoing series, right? How we look at different books and try to find replacements. So if you need a replacement, if you have a problematic book that you love, this is a safe place.

It’s free to come, and if you’re looking for a replacement for a problematic book, please send us a question, or if you have a great suggestion, if you’re like, ooh, this is what I read, instead of Little House, or this is what I read instead of Harry Potter, please send those to us.

We would love to have great new books to add to the canon. You can always email us at podcast@homeschoollifemag.com. And like I said, if you’re looking for replacements, if you need more, if you’re like, that’s a great list with Harry Potter books, I would like more please. Please email us.

We’d love to talk some more about books. 

[00:40:16] Amy: Yes, it’s the best. No, I think that this is gonna be a really fun piece of the podcast that we’re gonna get to do because. I’m always looking for new books anyway, and it’s great to be tracking down new books that replace books that maybe just don’t fit the kind of values that we hold anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. So I guess, Suzanne, that is a wrap for this episode of the podcast with Suzanne and Amy brought to you by home.school.life.now. We will be back soon to talk about — what are we going to talk about in our next podcast? 

[00:40:53] Suzanne: How to plan a class — if you want to take an idea and turn it into a class.

[00:40:59] Amy: Thanks so much for joining us for this episode of, the podcast, this podcast with Suzanne and Amy, brought to you by home.school.life.now. We will be back soon to talk more about all the places where home, school, and life intersect.

See you then! 

Amy Sharony

Amy Sharony is the founder and editor-in-chief of home | school | life magazine. She's a pretty nice person until someone starts pluralizing things with apostrophes, but then all bets are off.

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Episode 3: What Does Decolonizing the Curriculum Look Like for Secular Homeschoolers?