Exploring Themes of Identity, Empowerment, and Community: Amber McBride Educator Resources

Amber McBride is an award-winning author whose stories captivate the heart, mind, and spirit. Her works, though written for young readers, explore themes that are relevant to readers of every age. These themes include identity and empowerment, community, spirituality, and romantic love. McBride's writing creates an accessible place for young readers to feel, explore, and take away messages of hope and perseverance.

Interconnected Narratives and Hidden Easter Eggs

If you are a careful reader, you will find that all of Amber McBride’s works are connected, with small Easter eggs hidden in the pages of each title, giving glimpses of what you’ll discover when you read them all. Told through carefully constructed poetry and prose, McBride’s works, though written for young readers, explore themes that are relevant to readers of every age. While many conversations around these topics can be heavy, Amber’s work creates an accessible place for young readers to feel, explore, and take away messages of hope and perseverance.

Featured Work: Me (Moth)

Me (Moth) is a young adult novel suitable for ages 12-17. It was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and a 2022 Coretta Scott King John Steptoe Award for New Talent Winner.

The novel tells the story of a teen girl grieving the deaths of her family and a teen boy, Sani, who moved in with his mother and her new family. Moth and Sani take a road trip that has them chasing ghosts and searching for ancestors. The way each moves forward is surprising, powerful, and unforgettable.

Cross-Cultural Reverence and Multidimensional Genius

McBride artfully weaves Black Southern Hoodoo traditions with those of the Navajo/Diné people, creating a beautiful and cross-cultural reverence for the earth, its inhabitants, and our ancestors. McBride’s multidimensional genius shines through, artfully exposing the reality that Black Americans have lived lifetimes of dystopias. She scrupulously guides the complicated storyline and hard histories with context, definitions, and word choices.

Read also: Delve into Amber Rose's career

Literary Travel Guide Project

Halfway through the book, Moth lists the places she and Santi have planned to stop and visit on their road trip. The book continues with details about their road trip and the landmarks they explore. I love the idea of students creating a literary travel guide of the books they read. So many young adult books explore cities and the unique spots that propel the story. Consider the trip to Amsterdam Hazel and Augustus take in John Green’s Fault in our Stars trip or the importance of Central Park in New York City in The Catcher in the Rye. In fact, in Booked, author Richard Kreitner explores literary destinations filled with literary landmarks and destinations.

The assignment would require students to become the tour guides leading their fellow students on a trip through a young adult book they have read. Students are reading closely for the importance of setting in the story. The final assignment might be a choice of a travel essay, brochure, or even a television-style infomercial for their story. This project would entice would-be travelers to visit both the physical place described in the story, as well as the literary world created by the author.

Other Works and Themes

Onyx

It’s 1970, and following the death of his grandmother, Onyx, a 12-year-old Black boy, is left living alone with his mother, who has early onset dementia. Fearing losing Mama too, he keeps her condition a secret from everyone and instead vows to make sure that he keeps up the show of everything being OK at home. As readers follow Onyx in his endeavors to help his mother, they’re also given a glimpse into being a young Black boy who, for all his troubles in life, has just as many joyful moments with his family and friends.

Grief and Loss

Achingly tender…through quiet, in-between-feeling moments rendered in an eerie, philosophical tone, McBride considers the liminal spaces between life and death, as well as the weight of grief and loss on children, particularly Black youth.

Book Uncle and Me

The sequel to the award-winning Book Uncle and Me features bird lover Reeni and her quest to save her city's bird count event when the mayor tries to shut it down.

Nyx

With sea-levels rising, and the land deforested, over-mined, and affected by bushfires and drought--Tasmania is increasingly marooned, its people abandoned. Nyx's father wants them to leave while they still can, but for Nyx, West Hobart is all she's ever known and where her mother is buried. She seeks solace in the single surviving tree near her home--an 80-foot pine that has defied all odds. Bea, too, finds solace in the tree, and facing a move to the mainland herself, leaves a despairing note, wedged into a hole in its trunk. Nyx finds the note and writes back. But Nyx and Bea don't realize how special their tree truly is.

Roya

A sweet and tender story of a girl refugee finding a new home! Roya, her three brothers, and their parents have a new family member -- Mishka, a bunny rabbit.

Tola

In a trio of droll stories, award-winning author and storyteller Atinuke debuts an endearing and enduring character with plenty to prove. Tola lives in an apartment in the busy city of Lagos, Nigeria, with her sister, Moji, who is very clever; her brother, Dapo, who is very fast; and Grandmommy, who is very bossy. Tola may be small, but she's strong enough to carry a basket brimming with groceries home from the market, and she's clever enough to count out Grandmommy's change. In the fourth book of this irresistibly charming series, Tola finds creative solutions to her neighbors' difficulties--but can Tola solve her own problem when her friends call her a liar? With support from her family, friends, and neighbors, Tola learns about true friendship and the power of self-belief. There's no problem too big for Too Small Tola!

Little Shrew

Little Shrew is diligent in all parts of life. This collection of three short stories - perfect for emerging readers - is illustrated in Miyakoshi's signature soft monochrome palette with pops of color.

Mousse

In a new series for early readers, Mousse receives an unexpected visit--and forms an unlikely friendship. Picture-book maven Jarvis brings his subtle wit and charm to the chapter-book realm with this set of stories about a most endearing pair.

Bear and Bird

Bear and Bird are best friends, and they spend a lot of time together. Watch out for that crocodile!

Jack and Annie

Get ready for a wild ride as Jack and Annie find themselves in the Amazon Rainforest on a dangerous journey.

Amil

A hopeful and heartwarming story about finding joy after tragedy. At the turn of the new year in 1948, Amil and his family are trying to make a home in India, now independent of British rule.

Langston

It's 1946. Langston's mother has just died, and now they're leaving the rest of his family and friends. Lesa Cline-Ransome, author of the Coretta Scott King Honor picture book Before She Was Harriet, has crafted a lyrical debut novel about one boy's experiences during the Great Migration.

Three Women

Three women narrate a perilous wagon journey westward that could set them free--or cost them everything they have--in this intergenerational verse novel that explores the history of the Black homesteader movement.

Inspired by True Story

Inspired by the true story of how the Grand Mosque of Paris saved the lives of hundreds of Jews during World War II, this breathtaking tale of suspense, compassion, and courage stars an extraordinary young heroine readers will never forget.

Bat, Cat, and Rat

Join Bat, Cat, and Rat on their three-and-a-half sweet and silly roommate adventures. What happens when three friends--a bat, a cat, and a rat--move in together? In "Sharing," Bat, Cat, and Rat find a cozy home to share. In the second book in the Bat, Cat & Rat picture book series from New York Times bestsellers Ame Dyckman and Mark Teague, the roommates try to compromise on vacation plans in three-and-a-half sweet and silly stories. In the third book in the Bat, Cat & Rat series, hijinks ensue when the roommates take a trip to the beach in three-and-a-half sweet and silly stories.

A Monster Calls

From the best-selling author of A Monster Calls, this funny, wise middle-grade series explodes every stereotype--including what it means to be a hero--in a brilliant reptilian take on surviving school.

Gone Wolf

Spoiler alert: Gone Wolf, despite what you might surmise well through its first couple of hundred pages, is not set in a dystopia. At least not in the one you think.

Amber McBride on Gone Wolf

Roger Sutton: When I first read your novel, I thought, Oh, it’s a dystopia, with this kid who has a guardian dog to help her.

Amber McBride: That was the kind of vibe I was going for. I want people to think, Okay, this is interesting. We love dystopian novels. And then for there to be this twist about mental health and storytelling and how it can be healing.

AM: No, it was always going to come back to where it does. A lot of my books talk about clinical depression because I have it. I’ve had a lot of therapy, and I wanted to show how storytelling, or talk therapy, is so helpful to some people, especially young people. From the beginning, I knew that the narrative was going to change, and that people were going to think, Wait a second… With my editor Liz Szabla, we worked on how to balance each half: How much should be in the present day, and how much should we stick with the more dystopian vibe? I knew from the jump that Imogen was telling a story to cope with her reality. It was a story that she had told many therapists, but the therapist you meet, Dr. Lovingood, is the first one who says, “You know what, just tell me the whole story. I’m not going to tell you it’s wrong.

RS: It was so interesting to see her recounting to that doctor, in condensed form, a story I had just read.

AM: That’s so good to hear, because there was that fear - to an extent, that I was telling the same story again, in excerpt form, a watered-down version of it. The hope was that because everyone who read the first part of the book would be privileged to the full story that when you heard it a second time, you’d be taking these nuances and seeing it in a different kind of way. That was what a lot of the editing came down to, honestly, getting the two parts to balance well. At one point I wondered if it was two books.

RS: And our perception of the threat in the story changes. Once we realize that Imogen is telling us a story she has imagined, we’re kind of relieved because this horrible dystopia hasn’t happened.

AM: Emotional trauma, but also it draws attention to the fear that a lot of Black kids, and Black people in general, still have: If we keep allowing certain histories to be retold a certain way, will we end up in the same place that we were before? In Florida, they’re teaching the “good” parts of slavery. To think of Black students in classes having to hear their teachers say that is mortifying to me. It also causes mental health issues for that child. Thank God Imogen is not in this situation, but oh my gosh, how are we going to reconcile our own histories and understand that the enslavement of Black people was the building of America? That is our history. We have to look it in the eye. It’s difficult for anybody to do. But if we ignore it, history repeats. We know that. I was looking at that fear. I wanted people to have that huge sigh of, Oh my gosh, she’s safe, to an extent. Her body is not in direct harm right now, but her fear was based on something. It’s one of those books that I think middle graders, young adult, and adults will all read differently. I wanted it to be accessible on all levels, because I think adults, and some young adults too, will read more deeply into what Imogen is saying, but middle graders might still get that gut feeling you had of oh, good, she’s safe.

RS: You’re an English professor; maybe you can help me out here. Would you call this book, or at least the first part of the book, an example of Afrofuturism?

AM: Oh, this is an interesting question. When I read books by African Americans, I see African culture and folklore, and I still put that all into a folklore/storytelling aspect, whether it’s futuristic, modern, or set in the past. There is usually more world-building happening in Afrofuturism, whereas Gone Wolf relies a lot on the systems we already know. In Afrofuturism, I feel like I’m dealing with an entirely new world that I have to adjust myself to, where my book is building on tropes that are in our real world right now. But I don’t really believe in putting books in specific categories. I’m always mixing them and confusing people, and that’s what I like to do. If you look at books like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, that’s considered literary fiction. But it’s also a type of fairy tale. Is it magic realism? Is it historical fiction? It’s all these things. The books that mix those genres, I think, are best.

RS: Well, it is now. It’s fun to play with expectations. I watched the finale of Hijack last night - it was really good. Idris Elba is on a plane, it’s been hijacked, and he’s got to figure out a way to take back control of the plane. We see him in big trouble at the very end, and we think: Idris is the star of the show.

AM: It’s surprising. It’s startling. I was young when I saw The Sixth Sense, and that did it to me. I have always loved that moment of, “I thought everything was happening one way, but it’s happening a completely different way.” I get that with a lot of Guillermo del Toro movies too - the villain is never who you think it is.

RS: To go back to Gone Wolf, one thing I thought was really neat was that the history of the story, if not the story itself, begins right now. It begins in about 2018, and what we’re seeing in the first part of the story is the result of real-life events that you and I and the world are going through.

AM: A very scary virus. Very scary political climate. Increase of hate crimes across the board. Antisemitism. All of that’s happening now. The rumblings of that were happening when I first started thinking about the concept for this book. I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, right now. My mother’s from Charlottesville. The Unite the Right rally happened here, resulting in a young woman named Heather Heyer being killed after a car was driven into a crowd. It was very dystopian that Charlottesville, which considers itself pretty liberal for the South, is where these people came to protest over a statue and caused so much turmoil. It made me think actively about what happens when we start not telling history. And then book banning increased. When I write a book, I follow my curiosity. The thing that’s nagging me at that time, which in 2017 was the rally, is the thing I write about.

AM: I started writing the first ideas and drafts in 2017. There was a sickness in the story, but it wasn’t the COVID-19 virus or the pandemic. And then the book sat for a bit. It wasn’t fully developed. I had two other books come out. Then the virus happened, and it became so clear that that was another trauma we were all dealing with, so it was written into the book more profoundly than it was before. Also, I had lived experience that I did not have before, about what it would be like if some sort of virus arrived at our shores, and there was nothing we could do, and it affected the whole world. It shows that sometimes books have to sit until it’s time to write the most authentic version of them.

AM: Yes. This is my first novel where the first half of the book is prose; there’s verse in the back end of the book. The word count is different: I think the highest word count on my verse novels is 21,000 words; this one is around 60,000 words. It was definitely a task. At one point, I didn’t know if this was going to be in verse or not. I had written it in prose, and it still wasn’t working, and I switched it completely into verse over a month-long period, and that still didn’t work. There was a lot of playing with format - getting all the pieces to work in this book was the most difficult thing.

AM: There’s a lot happening.

AM: When I was talking about the balance of the book, it felt like we needed more in the present day. I guess the fear when I was writing was that the first part is so interesting and intricate, and then we come to the real world, where it’s not simple, but we’re just in present-day Charlottesville, Virginia. Are people going to be interested in this story? Liz and I talked about what things we do around here, out in the country. We go apple-picking. There’s my local coffee shop, Baine’s Books and Coffee, where the book release is going to be.

AM: It’s the church I was baptized in. The landmarks are real. There’s this duality: these horrible things happened in Charlottesville, and there’s a lot of complex emotions surrounding that, but I love this city.

RS: Do you see yourself more as Toni or more as Imogen?

AM: Anybody who knows me will say I am one thousand percent Imogen. I’m very emotional and driven. Imogen talks about her feelings a lot, and it’s become an inside joke with my friends who have read the book. When I’m in any kind of debate with them, they’re like, “Listen, Amber, I feel like…” I cannot get away from it. My parents do it to me now. That was me when I was a kid: I wanted people to understand how I felt. But also, I see the world in a very artistic way. I am annoyingly a poet. I will describe a sunset really beautifully to a person just standing beside me. I need to stop, because it’s awful sometimes. I’m a daydreamer. I’m definitely Imogen. The dog, Ira, is based on my German shepherd, Shiloh, who passed away last year. She was thirteen. It was always me and Shiloh, so Imogen and Ira were like me and Shiloh. It’s a very mirrored comparison there.

RS: Do you know the Shiloh books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor? I think there are three-the first one, Shiloh, won the Newbery Medal.

RS: Well, you would think so.

AM: I have read it!

AM: My Shiloh came from watching a documentary about a young girl who was born with her legs fused together. They called her Mermaid Girl, and she was just so joyful.

RS: You talked before about dealing with depression.

AM: I’ve been talking about depression a lot lately, because my last book, We Are All So Good at Smiling, was about clinical depression. I’m very open to talking about it, but I’ve never been asked how it affects me as a writer. For me, writing is a type of medicine. It’s why I write so quickly and have so many books going at once. I get to create the world and the circumstances, so it gives me this kind of autonomy in life that I crave. It also has often been my downfall. I can get manically obsessed with writing something when I’m in a depressive episode and not take care of myself, forget to eat, forget to sleep. I’ve written drafts of books in five days because of this. I think it makes me a good writer because I’m very in tune with what my characters are feeling. I also think it makes me extremely sensitive at all times, which is also difficult. But I’ve never not been able to write because I’m depressed. It usually is the one thing I can depend on. I should probably get some more hobbies. My therapist asks, “Amber, what did you do today?” And I’ll say, “I wrote three thousand words.” She’ll ask, “What else did you do?” I’m like, “Was there something else I was supposed to be doing?” I’m not antisocial, but I require a lot of alone time. I’m a very in-my-head human being. I use writing as a way to cope. The best thing I’ve learned is that everything I write doesn’t have to be published. I’ve got several books that won’t be published. They were written for me and my mental health, getting me through a difficult time.

AM: I’m very protective of them. Maybe a name or concept, but often no. There are so many stories to tell. I come from this vastness perspective. I have to tell myself, “Okay, Amber, this is the story you need to write,” because there are a thousand I could write. If I have to shelve a book and keep it for myself, I often think that’s a gift I wrote for me, and I want to keep it very private. But I’m really thinking on this question a lot now.

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