It started with a stack of library books.
My children would come home with an armful, and I would sit down to read with them, and somewhere around the third or fourth book I would notice the same thing again. There were children in these stories. There just were not any that looked like mine, except occasionally in the background, and occasionally as the lesson.
That is a small thing on any given Tuesday. Repeated across a childhood, it is not small at all. A child works out what is normal by noticing who keeps showing up on the cover.
Mirrors and windows.
The idea is not mine. Rudine Sims Bishop wrote about it decades ago: children need books that work as mirrors, showing them their own lives, and books that work as windows, showing them somebody else's. Most children get plenty of windows. Not every child gets a mirror.
So when a five-year-old opens Volume Five and sees Katherine Johnson standing next to Mae Jemison, she learns two things at the same time. She learns who they were. And she learns that a book will put someone like her on the front.
Written down to the age, not dumbed down.
A four-year-old can absolutely handle a real feeling and a real historical fact. What she cannot handle is adult sentence length and adult abstraction. So the work is translation, not simplification. Fannie Lou Hamer does not become a cartoon. The sentences get shorter and the idea stays whole.
That is also why the feelings books end with a Note for Grown-Ups. The hard part of social-emotional learning is rarely the story. It is the conversation after, and most of us are improvising it at eight at night.
Why the shelf runs from 4 to 12.
Because children do not stop needing this at seven. A family that finds us with a preschooler should still have somewhere to go three years later, when that child wants a real chapter book with a plot and stakes. That is why the catalog climbs: feelings books and picture-book mysteries at four, coloring and biography at five, the Shiba Force at eight, Bentley Rogers McGee and The Dream Book at nine and up.
Who makes them.
I write them. Tanya Spence co-writes the ChiChi Rose & Red Fox mysteries; she spent more than twenty years in a classroom and knows exactly how long you have before a group of five-year-olds stops listening. Spence Heritage Press is an imprint of Spence Consultants, LLC, a Black-owned independent publisher based in Mount Vernon, New York.
We are small on purpose. If you order locally, there is a real chance I drop it off myself.