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Article: A stark race gap - in kids' books; As more African-Americans get published, educators ask: Might their tales raise the reading skills of black students?(FEATURES)(LEARNING)
- Article from:
- The Christian Science Monitor
- Article date:
- August 17, 2004
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Christian Science Publishing Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Teresa Mendez Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
The girls in the sixth-grade at New York's Manhattan School for Children fell hard for Bobby. They fell so hard, in fact, that author Angela Johnson decided to pluck the doting teenage father and his daughter, Feather, from her 1998 book "Heaven" and cast them as the central characters in a later novel. She dedicated "The First Part Last," published in 2003, to that 1999-2000 sixth-grade class.
They weren't the only ones taken with "Heaven." A young girl walked into a book-signing in Columbus, Ohio, last fall, clutching a battered copy of the book. She threw her arms around Ms. Johnson, ...