Books with author Elizabeth Thomas

This book takes readers on a journey under the sea to discover the fascinating facts about great white sharks, including physical features, habitat, life cycle, food, and more. Photos, captions, and keywords supplement the narrative of this informational text, while additional search tools--including a glossary and an index--help students locate and review important information.

This book takes readers on a journey under the sea to discover the fascinating facts about goblin sharks, including physical features, habitat, life cycle, food, and more. Photos, captions, and keywords supplement the narrative of this informational text, while additional search tools--including a glossary and an index--help students locate and review important information.

This book takes readers on a journey under the sea to discover the fascinating facts about octopus, including physical features, habitat, life cycle, food, and more. Photos, captions, and keywords supplement the narrative of this informational text, while additional search tools--including a glossary and an index--help students locate and review important information.

This book takes readers on a journey under the sea to discover the fascinating facts about bottlenose dolphins, including physical features, habitat, life cycle, food, and more. Photos, captions, and keywords supplement the narrative of this informational text, while additional search tools--including a glossary and an index--help students locate and review important information.

Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imaginationStories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world. In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”

Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imaginationStories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world. In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”

Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imaginationStories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world. In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”

“A whole culture is imaginatively and authoritatively illuminated” in this “suspenseful, insightful, poignant” novel of prehistoric times (Publishers Weekly). Twenty thousand years ago, a courageous girl lived in Siberia near Woman Lake, a place you won’t find on any modern map. Only thirteen, Yanan and her companions—hunters of deer, gatherers of roots and twigs—struggle to survive the harsh realities of hunger and cold, bound by an unending cycle of birth, kinship, violence, and death. As Yanan recounts the terrible adventures of her brief life, she departs on spirit journeys that evoke the lives of the animals to which she and her people are intimately linked. A lyrical novel of our species’ prehistory, Reindeer Moon opens up corridors to the imagination that lead us back to the long-forgotten echoes of our distant human past. “Unforgettable . . . Reindeer Moon beautifully resurrects a lost world of merciless magnificence. Dozens of memorable characters live and die in this moving tale, which should become a classic.” —Chicago Tribune Book World “Those familiar with the author’s landmark study, The Harmless People, will not be surprised at the range of anthropological information she brings to her first novel, or at the lucidity of her prose. What will astonish, engross and move readers in her narrative of a group of hunter-gatherers who lived 20,000 years ago is the dramatic immediacy of the story and the depth and range of character development.” —Publishers Weekly

This book takes readers on a journey under the sea to discover the fascinating facts about goblin sharks, including physical features, habitat, life cycle, food, and more. Photos, captions, and keywords supplement the narrative of this informational text, while additional search tools--including a glossary and an index--help students locate and review important information.