Katie Woo – We Love You! – Books My Kids Read

Thank you to Capstone Publishing for providing me with a review copy of this book and for being a Silver level sponsor of Multicultural Children’s Book Day. All opinions are my own.

Having a 1st grader, I’m always on the look out for great books that are right in that sweet spot of great readers for K-2. So I jumped at the chance to read the newest Katie Woo book, Katie Woo, We Love You! by Fran Manushkin, which is being publishing this February. This is actually our first time reading Katie Woo, but E enjoyed the book we got so much that she read it repeatedly and quickly checked out another at the library.

Katie Woo is a young girl, probably in 1st or 2nd grade. The book itself is made up of 4 stand-alone short stories with lots of full color illustrations. This particular book has The Best Club, Katie’s Spooky Sleepover, Katie Blows her Top, and Daddy Can’t Dance. As a whole, the books works nicely as a transitional chapter book helping younger readers gain confidence to move to the next level.

The stories themselves are great bits of realistic fiction and have little life lessons in them to help young readers make sense of things that they are going through in their own lives. For example, in The Best Club, Katie and her friend JoJo are talking about starting a club. Another girl decides that she will start her own club and “it will be the best,” but that simply means that no one else manages to be good enough to be in it. Katie lets this other girl in on a special secret – “It’s okay if you are not the best….You just need to be yourself.” Wise words from a kid.

I was sent this book as a part of Multicultural Children’s Book Day. What is awesome about the Katie Woo series is that the essence of their multiculturalism is simply that many races are represented, but it is never the point of the story. Manushkin could have made Katie any race she chose, but she made Katie Woo the first Chinese American girl to be the star of her own series simply because that’s her great-neice’s name. The book itself is also full of characters of all kinds of races – African American, White, Japanese American, Mexican, and Muslim. This is exactly the kind of book that is needed to show that a multicultural world is simply the norm.

Multicultural Children’s Book Day 2017 (1/27/18) is in its 5^th year and was founded by Valarie Budayr from Jump Into A Book and Mia Wenjen from PragmaticMom. Our mission is to raise awareness of the ongoing need to include kids’ books that celebrate diversity in home and school bookshelves while also working diligently to get more of these types of books into the hands of young readers, parents and educators.

MCBD 2018 is honored to have some amazing Sponsors on board. View our 2018 MCBD Medallion Sponsors here: http://multiculturalchildrensbookday.com/2106-sponsors/mcbd2018-medallion-level-sponsors/

View our 2018 MCBD Author Sponsors here: http://multiculturalchildrensbookday.com/2106-sponsors/2018-author-sponsors/

We’d like to also give a shout-out to MCBD’s impressive CoHost Team who not only hosts the book review link-up on celebration day, but who also works tirelessly to spread the word of this event. View our CoHosts: http://multiculturalchildrensbookday.com/about/co-hosts/

TWITTER PARTY Sponsored by Scholastic Book Clubs: MCBD’s super-popular (and crazy-fun) annual Twitter Party will be held 1/27/18 at 9:00pm.