Parents' Guide to Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales

Virginia Hamilton creates a beautiful book illustrated by intensely colorful paintings. The oral history of African-American women has been passed on for centuries through spoken word, spirituals and lullabies, autobiographical musings, and nighttime tales, and Hamilton has collected the best of these. The comments that accompany the stories, explaining their history, colloquial language, and imagery, are as fascinating as the stories themselves, and contribute greatly to the sense of self a girl develops when reading these accounts.

The final three stories are oral histories of three African-American women. It is this chapter -- when we meet real women speaking in their own voices -- that brings the rest of the book together, giving perspective and context to the folklore and fairy tales.