A review by angiew23
With the Right to Fight: Planting Peace by Anika Christopher

5.0

This beautiful picture book biography tells the story of Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Muri Maathai. As the story explains, Wangari grew up in Kenya and learned to love and live off the land, after winning a scholarship to study in North America, she returns home years later to see that plantations had taken over her homeland. Wanting to support her family and home country she begins to plant trees and shows readers that change can start with something as small as a little seed. The story ends with a short timeline of Wangari's life. The pictures in this book are beautiful, especially those that come together in almost a collage-like format, for example, near the end of the story there is a picture of an outline of the continent of Africa and it is filled with a variety of different flowers. These kind of pictures are throughout the story and are really beautiful to look at. There is also a really beautiful illustration around the quote "always respect the land" which I think draws readers attention to this important message about caring for our planet. As a grade 3 teacher I could definitely see this book in my classroom library. I think it would be an excellent introduction to lessons on plants, poverty in African countries due to over farming the land for commercial agriculture, as well as earth day and demonstrating how to make change. I would recommend this book to teachers, librarians and families of children in the 5-11 age range. Picture book story biographies are great because they allow readers at a variety of levels to access the pictures and/or the story and can inspire the reader to dig deeper about the concepts or people described, if they choose, and I feel this book is a perfect example of that. I so appreciate Netgalley and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book!