
The news of Toni Morrison's passing on August 5 was met with tributes and gratitude for a life well lived. While she is best known as the author of such novels as The Bluest Eye and Beloved, Morrison also wrote several books for children. It is not yet too early to introduce the children in your life to the work of this incomparable writer.
The news of Toni Morrison's passing on August 5 was met with tributes and gratitude for a life well lived, for words that forever changed lives. While she is best known as the author of such Nobel and Pulitzer prize winning novels as The Bluest Eye and Beloved, Morrison also wrote several books for children, many of them in collaboration with her son Slade Morrison. It is not yet too early to introduce the children in your life to the work of this incomparable writer.
A young girl named Louise sets out for a walk on a rainy, gray day. Where will she go? To a place where she is "never alone, a shelter from any storm:" the library! In rhyming text ideal for young readers, Morrison demonstrates the power of books to help us "dream, discover, think, and explore." In a 2018 letter written in support of the Queens Public Library, Morrison recounted how working in her hometown library as a teenager "opened [her] eyes and shaped [her] future," even if she was fired for reading the books she was supposed to be shelving. "Libraries" she wrote, "connect people to resources that are life-changing."
More Children's Books by Toni Morrison
See below for more books by Morrison, Including several reinterpretations of Aesop's Fables written with her son Slade. The endings of these new fables are deliberately ambigous, providing good fodder for rich conversations with older children, even up to middle school. As in her works for adults, Morrison provides no easy answers, but instead writes less to give the reader space.