Fairy Tales for Young Socialists

Two years into Donald Trump's presidency, some progressive parents (and savvy publishers) have turned to children's books as a kind of palliative political education for the young during uneasy times. Among the recent offerings in this vein, there's Jill Twiss's A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a defense of same-sex marriage and a satire of the children's book written by Charlotte Pence, the vice president's daughter, about the Pence family's pet rabbit. There's All Are Welcome, by Alexandra Penfold, a gentle and yet pointedly utopian portrait of a school day when children of all races and religious backgrounds assist one another in their tasks with kindness and tolerance. And of course, there's Chelsea Clinton's She Persisted, an illustrated homage to glass-ceiling shatterers such as Sally Ride, Sonia Sotomayor, and Hillary Clinton, the author's mother. Oppositional politics, in other words, is now available in colorful, digestible tracts for even the youngest readers.