Books Build a Bridge to Humanity: A Guest Post from Tae Keller, Author of When You Trap a Tiger, Our January Young Reader Monthly Pick

By Tae Keller / January 4, 2023 at 4:59 am

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When You Trap a Tiger (Newbery Medal Winner)

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Paperback $8.99

When Lily moves with her family to Washington to be with her ailing grandmother, or Halmoni, the last thing she expects is to encounter a magical tiger she’s heard about in Halmoni’s Korean folktales. She soon learns that the tiger is the key to uncovering Halmoni’s past and possibly saving her life. When You Trap a Tiger is a powerful story about one of our greatest powers — storytelling and the effects those stories have on who we become. Keep reading from Tae Keller about the power of books and the way they bring connection and empathy to readers.

From the time I was born, my parents conspired to make me fall in love with reading. They didn’t have to try very hard. My childhood photos feature me hugging books, carrying them, drooling on them like beloved stuffed animals. The love affair was instant and abiding.

And as a lifelong reader, I can name dozens of reasons to love books.

I love the escapism. I always have — from when I was getting bullied in middle school, to when I was watching the world change in 2020. And I love the unexpected insights, too, the way reading from someone else’s perspective can illuminate something deeply true about my own.

I love the connection that comes through book clubs and group reads and even that flicker of recognition when I see someone reading a familiar paperback on the bus. And I love the way books can feel so deeply private and personal, the way a sentence can spark just right in my heart, so right I’m convinced it was written entirely for me.

I am a reader. I am a writer. I love words on a page.

But the more I’ve written for young people, the more I’ve thought about what happens beyond the page. Because books, in some sense, are a training ground for empathy. Or rather, to use gentler language, they are an invitation into empathy. When we are invited into the mind of someone different from us, in a life different from our own, we are reminded that everyone has a story.

Stories are human — to have them, to tell them, to hear them, to hold them. To hear someone’s story is to see them as human. To hold someone’s story in our heart is to become more human ourselves. We practice this in fiction so we can apply it in real life, so we can see others and ourselves and our connections more clearly.

Books build a bridge to humanity. I think about this every time I sit down to write, whether I’m writing about familial connection in When You Trap a Tiger, or forgiveness and redemption in Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone, or female stereotypes in the Mihi Ever After series. I want to tell a good story that provides escapism and insight and sentences that feel right. But more than anything, I want to tell a story that leads its young readers toward empathy.

I think about that, too, whenever I open a new book.

And then, of course, when I close it.