Pride: Celebrating Diversity & Community

by Robin Stevenson

Overview

For LGBTQ people and their supporters, Pride events are an opportunity to honor the past, protest injustice, and celebrate a diverse and vibrant community. The high point of Pride, the Pride Parade, is spectacular and colorful. But there is a whole lot more to Pride than rainbow flags and amazing outfits. How did Pride come to be? And what does Pride mean to the people who celebrate it?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459809932
Publisher:	Orca Book Publishers
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	382,074
Product dimensions:	7.60(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1170L (what's this?)
Age Range:	9 - 13 Years

About the Author

Robin Stevenson is the author of twenty books for kids and teens. Her novels include The World Without Us and The Summer We Saved the Bees, as well as the Silver Birch Award-winner Record Breaker, and the Governor General's Award finalist, A Thousand Shades of Blue. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia. For more information, visit www.robinstevenson.com.

Editorial Reviews

"This timely, attractive and cheerful book will engage any student from middle school and beyond...Extremely well designed...The writing is clear and completely straightforward, addressing the intended reader honestly and without talking down at all. The writer portrays the LGBTQ community as normal and welcoming, powerful and inclusive, the way most Canadians, especially students, view it today. This book is a must-buy for all schools in Canada."

Resource Links

"Not only about celebration, but also protest and the future of acceptance. Colorful pictures with bold captions coupled with sidebars labeled as Queer Facts make this an eye-pleasing option for a broad audience and will lend itself to the conversation."

School Library Connection

"A fantastic achievement, a book that gives serious attention to often ignored groups within LGBT history...Stevenson’s account of the history of Pride is peppered with historical photos and documents, personal stories—including Stevenson’s own—“Queer Facts,” and highlights of the growing Pride movements around the globe, many of which all too often become background noise on global news stations...What makes this book suitable and relevant to young readers is the emphasis that Stevenson places on youth involvement in contemporary and historical celebrations and activism. A number of the personal accounts and quotes throughout the book are also from young people. This is an incredibly detailed account, considering the short page count, and Pride should be shelved in school libraries and classrooms alike as a more contemporary companion to Ken Setterington’s Branded by the Pink Triangle. Highly Recommended."

CM Magazine

"Informative...Positively festive in its attitudes and outlook, this book more than lives up to the word celebrating in its subtitle."

Booklist

Upbeat and matter-of-fact...I can see this book nestled between Canada Day and Thanksgiving in the celebrations section of the library, filling a gap...Solid non-fiction...As useful and appealing as this book will be to a general audience, there will be another group of readers seeking it out with more focus. Not every kid, even in this country, lives in a joyous climate of acceptance, and books are often a place where they find information and community. Much of this is provided in the form of individual vignettes. These stories, sad and happy, are where vulnerable preteen kids may see themselves."

Quill & Quire

Celebrations of the GLBTQ community and their allies have been and will continue to be a battle against the political and social climates in many countries around the world. Stevenson’s goal in her book, Pride, is to share the history of the struggle for recognition, rights, and acceptance by starting with her own country, Canada, and discussing others. Four chapters, from “The History of Pride” to “Pride Around the World,” are occupied with quotes, pictures, and easily understood text that focuses on the concept of gay pride and the parades that have followed; it does well to address the obstacles that the community has faced and puts names and faces to those who are the agents of change in legislation and advocacy. Stevenson also includes definitions of vocabulary terms, descriptions of negative and positive symbols related to the GLBTQ community, and how both negative terms and symbols have been reclaimed and incorporated into pride events, while sharing the continued need to fight in countries where being gay is still illegal or repressed. The book has a narrow focus, but Stevenson injects her own experiences as well. Because of its specificity, brevity is necessary but the book could be more useful if it left out her own stories and kept to significant events and people and provided a timeline: this book leans conversational. For libraries looking to increase nonfiction titles on GLBTQ topics, this could be considered, but not as a first pick. Reviewer: Alicia Abdul; Ages 11 to 18.

VOYA, April 2016 (Vol. 39, No. 1) - Alicia Abdul

2016-01-20
LGBTQ culture and rights are covered through the prism of Pride in this timely work. Beginning with gay history, Stevenson explains how Pride events began as a way to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots but have gradually shifted from focusing on gay liberation toward a celebration of gay pride. Yet while Pride events are held all over the world, whether small parades or weeklong celebrations, there are still struggles within the LGBTQ community and against those who identify as LGBTQ. But with the work of activists of all ages, Pride and LGBTQ rights can prevail against homophobia and other forms of discrimination. Using Pride as a way to talk about LGBTQ gives the information a new slant, yet Stevenson may confuse readers by vacillating between subjectivity and objectivity. She frequently uses the personal pronoun, flipping, even within a paragraph, from "some people wanted" to "we should," muddying the waters a bit: is this a memoir or a piece of cultural and historical nonfiction? The appropriately rainbow-themed design features plentiful photographs, both black-and-white and color, in a lively design. They've been carefully chosen to highlight the diversity within the community, from First Nations drummers in a Vancouver parade to an Asian man holding hands with a white man in an Oslo celebration. This attractive work will be welcomed by readers searching for guidance and hope. (glossary, references, resources, index, acknowledgments, author's note) (Nonfiction. 12-16)

Kirkus Reviews