Fictions of Integration: American Children's Literature and the Legacies of Brown v. Board of Education by Naomi Lesley (review)

In recent years, children's and young adult literature has reemerged as a powerful genre that allows scholars to reexamine historical periods and racial formation in local and global contexts. Lesley's Fictions of Integration continues this conversation through investigating children's literature as a gateway into the cultural memory of the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education. Lesley examines how these stories function within the history of race within the United States. Through her interdisciplinary archival endeavor, Lesley presents a volume that centers questions of racial representation as well as pedagogy. She argues that "the school setting operates within children's books much as it does in real life" and links novels for youth to questions of representation, citizenship, and the nation-state (6). Lesley shows through the genres of school stories, historical fiction, and contemporary realism that literature for children offers both a practical and rhetorical (re)framing of desegregation, educational reform, and broader issues of race. She poses the extremely relevant question: "what [are] students in the post-Brown era told about the racial dynamics of their own classrooms through the books aimed specifically at them?" (156)

To represent the coexisting, contradictory, and complicated issue of school desegregation, Lesley takes an unconventional, broad approach throughout the book. She focuses not only on children's novels that explicitly address Brown, but also on those influenced by the Brown decision. Her titles include books by African American and non–African American authors, and her chapters are not organized chronologically but are instead grouped according to the texts' lens on desegregation. Chapter 1 reflects on the direct aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education and the experiences of the first Black students to enter predominately white schools. These stories tended to promote a utopian education through a "successful" and "hopeful" school year. Chapter 2 moves beyond these optimistic narratives to discuss desegregation novels that emphasize discontent with desegregation as expressed in several Black communities. As a part of the backlash, chapter 3 critically engagees with the use of disability diagnosis as a means to sort and segregate students post-Brown. This form of re-segregation is depicted in a small handful of texts aimed at addressing both race and disability. Chapter 4 analyzes those novels that do not directly engage or cite Brown but are clearly impacted by Brown's unfinished goals in the neoliberal moment. All of the chapters attempt to underscore the dynamics of control and resistance that the selected authors account for in their narrations of ideological shifts within the schools' system. The chosen novels and lenses range widely, but collectively provide nuance and balance as each chapter beautifully addresses one element of the Brown v. Board of Education legacy.

Despite the array of texts, Fictions of Integration isolates desegregation from other important civil rights issues, a critique Lesley addresses. She is aware that her "narrow approach" may leave room to explore school integration over time but forecloses discussions that link desegregation to the plethora of other civil rights issues represented for young readers, including but not limited to gentrification, children's participations in protests, and interracial dating (14). However, Lesley does present an opening for scholars and authors to explore schools as indoctrinating and homogenizing institutions post-Brown and how this relates to others facets of the civil rights movement.

In a moment where lists of anti-racist children's books are being circulated on social media and children's literature is being elevated and understood as an inherently political category—thanks to the work of scholars such as Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Katherine Capshaw, Philip Nel—Fictions of Integration helps to contextualize the need to historicize and critically engage with literature for children, especially regarding education. As Lesley writes, "given the troubled history of school desegregation, we should reflect on the value of continued, persistent failure—on why continuing...