This is a great way to make this part of US, specifically Los Angeles history accessible to younger audiences. This wasn’t a part of history I’d heard before, but sadly it doesn’t surprise me given other historical massacres on top of American responses to Chinese (and other Asian) people in 2020 and since due to Covid-19. The art really added to the intensity of the story. Now I want to do some more reading on this event.

When I was doing research on the historical novel I was working on, about the Chinese in California in the 1800s, I wanted to know every evil that was done to them. The massacre that happened in Los Angeles was one I read about. This picture book about the incident explains it in clear plain language, a thing that was so horrible, it is not mentioned even when learning local history.

The sad thing about history is that it repeats itself, and if we don’t learn from it, we are doomed to have the same thing happen all over again. Just as now there are some that say that anyone who isn’t white are scum and bring illness and crime, so did the local papers do in the late 1800s. They also said that the Chinese were taking the white people’s jobs, even though the Chinese did the work that no one else wanted to do. The cooking, the cleaning, and the washing.

Beautifully illustrated book, about a truly horrible time in US history, that needs to be told.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review. This book is coming out on the 4th of March 2025.