Review: Welcome to the Cipher
Do you want to celebrate Black History Month with a Canadian author and illustrator pair published by a Canadian small press? Welcome to the Cipher, by author Khodi Dill and illustrator Awuradwoa Afful, is an upbeat encouragement to speak your truth through the medium of rap.
I love this book for so many reasons - the gorgeous color palette, the diverse kids, the rhyming text - but the main reason I love it is that it encourages kids to speak out about whatever is important to them.
“But aren’t there are a lot of picture books about how kids should speak up, Little Free Librarian?” Well. There are lots of books about how kids should tell bullies to stop bullying. There are picture book biographies of adult activists. There are books about being brave enough to answer questions in class. And those are good! But they are either about grownups, or they are about coaching kids to say something specific in a specific situation. What they don’t say - and what Welcome to the Cipher definitely does say - is that whatever kids’ thoughts and feelings are, they have value and deserve expression. Not only that, but when kids’ feelings are expressed in the medium of rap, they become art. The encouragement in this book is something kids very rarely hear. My highest praise to Dill and Afful for that.
Welcome to the Cipher is published by Annick Press. It was a joint winner of the Canadian Children’s Books Centre Best Books for Kids and Teens in 2022.