Man, I was really excited to see HarperCollins Reading Warriors program, an online resource offering a bunch of downloadable tools for kiddies looking to read over the summer and teachers looking to guide that reading. It’s available here: http://www.readingwarriors.com/rwshell.html.
HOWEVER, a quick skim through the titles recommended for further reading suggests that HC didn’t do the legwork to find titles representing a diversity of characters — the majority of the main characters are male, with plucky female sidekicks. The books featuring trios as their main focus again seem to center on male narrators. This is a bit disappointing, since the Warriors is series centering on feline politics (um, awesome much?) and features Bluestar, an older female tabby, as the leader of Thunderclan and a matriarch with a tragic past. What struck me the most about the series is that even embodied gender decisions (IE who nurses whose kittens) get political — I thought this was a way of introducing a sort of empowered body politics for younger readers, but this is totally not reflected in the supplementary reading lists recommmended by HC.
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