Nita’s First Signs has been selected for the Children’s Book Council’s Spring 2023 Showcase: Spring Into a New You! Check out the complete list of recommended titles that help kids try new activities and hobbies.
Read This!: GOOD DIFFERENT by Meg Eden Kuyatt
Good Different by Meg Eden Kuyatt
Summary: Selah knows her rules for being normal. She always, always sticks to them. This means keeping her feelings locked tightly inside, despite the way they build up inside her as each school day goes on, so that she has to run to the bathroom and hide in the stall until she can calm down. So that she has to tear off her normal-person mask the second she gets home from school, and listen to her favorite pop song on repeat, trying to recharge. Selah feels like a dragon stuck in a world of humans, but she knows how to hide it. Until the day she explodes and hits a fellow student. Selah’s friends pull away from her, her school threatens expulsion, and her comfortable, familiar world starts to crumble. But as Selah starts to figure out more about who she is, she comes to understand that different doesn’t mean damaged. Can she get her school to understand that, too, before it’s too late?
How I adore this book! The author’s gorgeous use of imagery puts us directly into Selah’s point of view. I felt the itchiness of that school uniform and smelled that sour milk big-box store smell. Every detail, from Selah’s dragon metaphors to Pop’s four-colored pen to a through-the-bathroom-stall-wall conversation at FantasyCon, is pitch perfect. This deeply realized and beautifully rendered OwnVoices novel should be on every reading list.
GOOD DIFFERENT is out now.
Now available: Super Cities! Baltimore
Now available: my newest book, dedicated to my hometown of Baltimore! Check it out to learn all about Charm City.
Super Cities! Baltimore by Kathy MacMillan
Arcadia Publishing, 2023. $14.99.
Sometimes the coolest places are right outside your front door. Learning about Baltimore’s interesting and unique culture has never been so super fun!
ISBN 9781467198981
Order now from Arcadia Publishing | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Bookshop.org
Catch NITA’S FIRST SIGNS on Netflix!
Nita’s First Signs is now streaming on Netflix as part of the Story Time Book Read-Along series! Check out these animated read-along storybooks here. Kids can read along with illustrated books that come to life through animation, music and narration. Exciting adventures, fuzzy animal friends and more! (Find Nita’s First Signs in Episode #7: Kindness and Family.)
Read This!: DEAF UTOPIA by Nyle DiMarco
Deaf Utopia: A Memoir – And a Love Letter to a Way of Life by Nyle DiMarco with Robert Siebert
Summary: In this moving and engrossing memoir, Nyle shares stories, both heartbreaking and humorous, of what it means to navigate a world built for hearing people. From growing up in a rough-and-tumble childhood in Queens with his big and loving Italian-American family to where he is now, Nyle has always been driven to explore beyond the boundaries given him. A college math major and athlete at Gallaudet—the famed university for the Deaf in Washington, DC—Nyle was drawn as a young man to acting, and dove headfirst into the reality show competitions America’s Next Top Model and Dancing with the Stars—ultimately winning both competitions. Deaf Utopia is more than a memoir, it is a cultural anthem—a proud and defiant song of Deaf culture and a love letter to American Sign Language, Nyle’s primary language. Through his stories and those of his Deaf brothers, parents, and grandparents, Nyle opens many windows into the Deaf experience.
DiMarco’s memoir is open and honest, at turns hilarious and poignant. The subtitle “A memoir – and a love letter to a way of life” is right on; DiMarco draws back the curtain on what it was like to grow up in a big Deaf family, from the joys of ASL signs zinging around the dinner table to the tragedies of discrimination from the hearing world and the language deprivation experienced by his father. In describing his experiences on America’s Next Top Model and Dancing with the Stars, he offers a clear-eyed understanding of the ways producers shape the narratives in reality TV, while also cogently analyzing the accessibility fails along the way. Through candid anecdotes, he tracks his changing understanding of his own sexuality, finally embracing his queer identity. Throughout the narrative, the book weaves in just enough background information about ASL and Deaf culture and history to help even newcomers to the topic understand how DiMarco’s personal story fits into the bigger picture of the multifaceted Deaf community.
DEAF UTOPIA is out now.
Stories By Hand with Kathy MacMillan 