The Best Children’s Books About Identity

Identity is not a question a child sits down to answer. It arrives in fragments, and usually from other people: a teacher who gives up halfway through a name, a classmate who asks where you are really from, an aunt who says you got those eyes from your grandmother, a stranger who reaches for your hair without asking. Long before a child can define the word, they have been handed a set of facts — a name, a face, a language spoken at home, a country somebody left — and have begun quietly deciding which of them to keep out loud.

Drawing from Bookroo’s collection of 1,923 books about identity, our editors chose the ones that treat those facts as worth having rather than problems to be solved: names that are sung rather than pronounced, hair that takes an hour and is worth it, skin the color of midnight, watercress pulled out of an Ohio ditch, a girl who declines to pick one of her two halves. Start with our fixed shortlist of 13 favorites, then browse by age — first books for the toddler who has just noticed that skin comes in colors, read-alouds for the year school starts sorting children by how they look, and middle-grade novels for readers old enough to feel the gap between who they are and what they are assumed to be.