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Every January, readers who love books for children, tweens, and teens get excited about the annual awards and “best of” lists created by librarians. Among the most well known are the Caldecott Award, honoring the best in illustration; the Newbery medal, honoring the best in books for readers up to age 14; and the Printz award for the best books written for teen readers. These are not the only awards, nor are they the only lists that emerge from a year’s worth of reading, reviewing, and debating what it means to be “the best.”
One list produced each year since 2002 is RISE: A Feminist Book Project. Formerly called the Amelia Bloomer List, the list was reimagined as the RISE project in 2019. Librarians who create the list are members of the Feminist Task Force and/or the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association. Their decision to rename the award came because they saw it the duty of library workers to pursue correcting inequities, something that Bloomer in her era did not model. You can and should read more about that decision on the RISE website.
With that change came, too, the re-emphasis that the books included as the best feminist reads for children, tweens, and teens focused on social justice, intersectionality, and deliberate anti-racism. These aren’t simply books with strong female characters–a description in and of itself without a real definition.
RISE: A Feminist Book Project released their picks for more than 50 of the best feminist reads for young people age 0-18 published over the last year. Among them are board books, picture books, middle grade novels and nonfiction, and YA novels and nonfiction. The committee called out 10 titles as the best of the best, which include the following:
Some of the other books on the list include:
Check out the entire list of best feminist reads for children, tweens, and teens at the Rise: A Feminist Book Project website.