Who Needs a Statue?

by Eve LaPlante, Margy Burns Knight, Alix Delinois (Illustrator)

Overview

A 2025 Notable Book for a Global Society Award Winner

 This story examines some of the women and BIPOC figures included at the Capitol—and featured in statues around the country—as well as examines the timely question: who needs a statue?

Did you know the U.S. Capitol building features one hundred statues? Each state selects two prominent figures in their history to be included as statues to represent the state in Washington, D.C. But who is chosen to represent this nation? Why are they chosen? And do they really represent this diverse and multifaceted country? 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780884489511
Publisher:	Tilbury House Publishers
Publication date:	10/15/2024
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	10.10(w) x 10.40(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	7 - 10 Years

About the Author

Eve LaPlante is the author of Marmee & Louisa, American Jezebel, Seized, and Salem Witch Judge, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. She has degrees from Princeton and Harvard. Who Needs A Statue? is her first book for children. Please visit with Eve at her website.


Margy Burns Knight is a children’s book author and educator. She received the National Education Association’s Author Illustrator Human and Civil Rights Award and is a Peace Corps veteran. She lives in Maine, where she serves on the board of her local library and coordinates Let’s Talk, a conversational English class for resettled refugees.

Alix Delinois is a fine artist and art teacher living in Harlem, New York. He was born in Saint Marc, Haiti, and moved to Harlem as a child. His formal training began at fourteen when he was selected to the City College Arts Institute for inner city students. He went on to the High School of Art and Design, the Fashion Institute of Technology and Pratt Institute. In addition to his art training, Delinois holds a Master’s in Art Education from Brooklyn College. Alix’s work displays dynamic color palette and bold compositions to express human emotions and experience. He has illustrated multiple children’s books, including two by award-winning authors Walter Dean Myers and Edwidge Danticat.

Editorial Reviews

"Expressive illustrations captured with a dynamic color paletteportray kids posing next to sculptures, imitating poses, or seemingly engaged in conversation,adding immediacy to the bronze and marble works. Ample back matter provides additionalbiographical information. This inclusive and fresh approach to communities will pep up localhistory collections. Starred Review"

Booklist - Kathleen McBroom

"Who Needs a Statue? addresses not just who is worthy of commemoration but why we need statues at all. Statues help us remember, of course, and they honor worthy people; each also tells a story, which is what Eve LaPlante and Margy Burns Knight do in their brief biographies, rendered with economy and insight... Who Needs a Statue? is meant to provoke thought and to start discussions and to show that history is never a settled matter, and that what we value today may not be quite the same as what was valued in the past, or what may be valued in the future.."

Plumbing the Whys and Wherefores of Statues in a Period When Many Are Being Replaced - The New York Sun - Carl Rollyson

"2025 Notable Books for a Global Society Award from the Children’s Literature and Reading Special Interest Group (CL/R SIG) of the International Literacy Association (ILA) "

From the Publisher

"2025 Notable Books for a Global Society Award"

Who Needs A Statue? - International Literacy Association (ILA) - Children’s Literature and Reading Special Interest Group (CL/R SIG)

2024-07-19
A gallery of intrepid American groundbreakers, pathfinders, and activists who have earned commemorative statues.

Starting at the U.S. Capitol and ranging as far afield as an airport in Austin, Texas, and a park in Napa, California, the book covers more than a dozen figures—all either women, people of color, or both—who have been immortalized in stone or bronze. Many of the names will likely be unfamiliar to young readers. Beginning with Thocmetony Sarah Winnemucca, the first published Native American woman author, and continuing on past the inspirational likes of Anne Hutchinson (who was banished from colonial Massachusetts for illegally teaching men), comet discoverer Maria Mitchell, and Olympians and activists Tommie Smith and John Carlos, each entry features a brief but sonorous initial annotation and a more detailed one in the backmatter that identifies the statues’ sculptors. Delinois’ painterly images don’t always capture the individual style or character of the monuments the way photos would have, but he does take advantage of his medium to add homey or historical flourishes, such as a view of Deborah Sampson—who dressed in men’s clothes in order to fight in the American Revolution—blasting away at a group of redcoats and an image of a child in a wheelchair seated next to a chatty effigy of Everglades advocate Marjory Stoneman Douglas in a garden near Miami. An oblique closing reference to commemorative statues being removed or replaced in many localities ends this powerful recitation on a cogent note.

Deserving but less prominent luminaries shine more brightly here.(Informational picture book. 7-10)

Kirkus Reviews