2023 ALA RAINBOW BOOK LIST
WINNER 2023 DOUG WRIGHT AWARD
A completely new approach to learning about puberty, sex, and gender for kids 10+. Here is the much-anticipated third book in the trilogy that started with the award-winning
What Makes a Baby and
Sex Is a Funny Word "Silverberg's writing is fearless . . . Here is that rare voice that can talk about the hardest things kids go through in ways that are thoughtful, lighthearted and always respectful of their intelligence."
--Rachel Brian,
The New York Times Book Review
In a bright graphic format featuring four dynamic middle schoolers,
You Know, Sex grounds sex education in social justice, covering not only the big three of puberty--hormones, reproduction, and development--but also power, pleasure, and how to be a decent human being.
Centering young people's experiences of pressures and joy, risk and reward, and confusion and discovery, there are chapters on body autonomy, disclosure, stigma, harassment, pornography, trauma, masturbation, consent, boundaries and safety in our media-saturated world, puberty and reproduction that includes trans, non-binary, and intersex bodies and experience, and more.
Racially and ethnically diverse, inclusive of cross-disability experience, this is a book for every kind of young person and every kind of family.
You Know, Sex is the first thoroughly modern sex ed book for every body navigating puberty and adolesence, essential for kids, everyone who knows a kid, and anyone who has ever been a kid.
Raised in the 1970s by a children's librarian and a sex therapist, CORY SILVERBERG grew up to be a sex educator, an author, and queer person who smiles a lot when they talk. Cory received a master's degree in education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Cory is the co-author of four books, including the ALA Stonewall Honor Book Sex Is a Funny Word and What Makes a Baby, both with Fiona Smyth. Cory's life is full of kids. All of them know where babies come from. Some know more.
Toronto feminist painter/illustrator/cartoonist/educator FIONA SMYTH collaborated with sex educator Cory Silverberg on the kids' books "What Makes a Baby" and "Sex Is a Funny Word" (Seven Stories Press), 2016 ALA Stonewall Book Award Honor book and 2016 Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children's Non-Fiction winner. Her comics appear in Francoise Mouly and Nadja Spiegelman's Resist #1 and 2, a thirty-year collection of her comics "Somnambulance" published by Koyama Press, and the anthology "Theater of Terror- Revenge of the Queers" with Mariko Tamaki. Fiona was inducted into the Doug Wright Awards' Giants of The North Canadian Cartoonist Hall of Fame alongside Alootook Ipellie in 2019. She teaches illustration and cartooning at OCAD U and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
