Each spread delivers a concise declaration: “Beautiful Black Boy, / You are imaginative. / Believe in the impossible. Dream big.” The text is simple but purposeful, presenting qualities such as strength, hope, and resilience with clarity and pride. Robinson’s rhythmic phrasing reads like a mantra, encouraging readers to internalize the message. Daley’s vibrant illustrations amplify the book’s joyful spirit. Each spread features a different boy; the children depicted vary in complexion, body type, hair texture, and personal style, highlighting the rich diversity of Black childhood. Saturated colors, expressive brushstrokes, and energetic shapes create a sense of motion and celebration. Words swirl through the backgrounds, embedded into the artwork. The boys’ faces radiate wonder and confidence, their upward gazes suggesting imagination and limitless possibility. Robinson’s message will resonate. Each affirmation feels like a spoken blessing meant to be read aloud and repeated. The result is both tender and empowering, a book that shows young readers they are seen, valued, and loved.

As the holiday approaches, Ms. Tam announces a classwide party-planning contest; students will vote on their favorite idea. Excitement grows, but not all students are thrilled about the holiday. Bee, who has two fathers, was conceived via egg donor and carried by a surrogate, and she isn’t sure if her dads will even be invited. When classroom bully Penny says it will surely be a “mothers-only party,” Bee’s “squiggly squirmy” feelings get even worse. Bee’s besties Sarah and Tiam—the three of them call themselves the Winged Wonders due to their passion for bugs—swoop in to support her, and they mull a nature-inspired pitch that will win everyone over without leaving anyone out. Their party idea gets better and better, but is it good enough to win? Neville’s debut is a promising kickoff to an affirming, inclusive early chapter book series. Bee is an endearing, sensitive narrator; even as she grapples with her own insecurities, she frets when she inadvertently makes a classmate feel self-conscious about his family. A bee motif—Bee’s nickname stems from her love of the insects; when the classmates work together, Bee compares them to a buzzing hive—adds a layer of whimsy. Spot and full-page cartoon illustrations depict a racially diverse classroom; Bee is pale-skinned.

Seventeen-year-old Indigo “Indie” Watson is a star soccer player at her school in Meadow Creek, Pennsylvania, and she’s also the emotional cornerstone of her family. At a Saturday night party, Indie drinks too much with her friend and crush, “Boy X”; the next morning, she doesn’t remember what happened, but she suspects that he raped her. She doesn’t go to school and takes refuge in bed, too ashamed even to confide in concerned friends and family members. She feels that telling them would be too much of a burden on them, as they already have troubles of their own. Her older brother, Dylan, for instance, nearly failed out of school, and her father has self-medicated with alcohol ever since the death of Indie’s beloved Gramps several years ago. Before long, the information spreads through the school. Later, Indie flees a soccer game, seeking refuge at Muddy Rivers Café and hiding there after closing; there, she converses with strangers, some more benign than others. The Harry Potter references throughout the story feel obtrusive and dated. However, the narrative does efficiently examine ingrained misogyny in society and how it feeds into rape culture. Indie’s narrative voice also rings true, as expressed in simple but evocative prose: “We look up, together. ­/ The birds / in the tree above / sing of spring / and what is / to come. // And I believe them.” The narrative favors a clearcut message of female solidarity (“An invisible army of women stands with me”) and doesn’t address male or nonbinary rape survivors. Overall, though, this work offers a solid primer on the topic of sexual assault for a YA audience.

Founded by young revolutionaries in 1897 in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania, the Bund was “a sometimes-clandestine political party whose tenets were humane, socialist, secular, and defiantly Jewish,” as writer and artist Crabapple has it. Descended from Bundists and Puerto Rican radicals, Crabapple (née Caban) immediately connects the Bundist experience with modern leftist struggles: “The Bund fought for the very multiracial, democratic socialism that a new generation now champions.” Yet the Bund itself has disappeared. Some of its early proponents were scattered to what Crabapple calls “Exileland” in the “revolutionary diaspora” that followed pogroms, tsarist oppression, Cossack attacks, and the like; a few converted early on to Zionism and left for Palestine. More went there in the wake of the Holocaust, with the Bundist-led Warsaw Uprising having led to its own slaughter: “Their party had given them fairy tales,” Crabapple writes of the survivors. “Zionists offered a place where they could rebuild their lives.” In a sweeping narrative that urges anti-Zionism and Palestinian liberation while being, yes, defiantly Jewish, Crabapple follows in the Bundists’ path, finding herself in Lviv, Ukraine, wondering at the absence of Jews when the city was once a major Jewish center. “Things change,” a friend replies. So they do, but the same spirit that animated anti-tsarist revolution, union organizing in the new shtetls of New York, solidarity with other oppressed peoples, a profound commitment to self-improvement and learning, and a burning sense of justice clearly lives, at least in possibility: “The past is not dead. …It holds tight to our eternal present, sometimes invisibly, but ready to be reclaimed by those who need it.” Thanks to her book, richly illustrated with her own artwork, that reclamation is ready to hand.

This debut compilation of 15 tales, often driven by unlikely premises, works hard to upend readers’ assumptions. “My Son, David,” for example, centers on a young boy’s unsettling plea to leave his bedroom window open—and allow access to monsters that only he can see: “They need to come back or they can’t go home.” Many tales’ premises carry stark consequences, including the risk of damnation, as when an alluring hitchhiker tells the overeager buyer of “Jeremy’s New Car,” “Well, you make nothing in hell, right? So, to make that money, you’ve gotta work a pretty long time.” In other cases, the price doesn’t mean risking life or limb, but continuing to carry the weight of an unrealized dream—a fate that ensnares an obsessive hunter in “The Majestic, but Elusive, Rhino-Elephant” and an overly ambitious couple scrambling for an unobstructed view of Lake Ontario in “The Views Are Wonderful”: “Being underwater is a terrible thing, whether in the lake, or on dry land seven stories up.” The overall effect, in the best of these tales, is a deft blend of Twilight Zone–style irony and Ernest Hemingway–like economy, as in “Rachel,” whose final twist brings down the curtain on a story within a story. Other works seem closer to sketches, although they’re still served up with economical flair. “The Hand That Claps Last, Claps Loudest,” for instance, seems like a setup to the dirty joke about “opportunities that are presented and taken away” during a torrid sexual encounter, yet it only takes 250 words to make its point. The stories’ lessons would be lost or muddled in lesser hands, but they’re clearly imprinted with the author’s style and raise expectations for future offerings.