When the World Turned Upside Down by K. Ibura

Welcome Back, Booklovers! It has been a crazy two years and I feel like as an essential worker I've been going going going and haven't had much time to sit down and reflect on everything that's happened. I know there's been some anthologies about lockdown they released in 2020 and beyond and people have mixed opinions about them. This is the first story I've read really tackling the pandemic. I received a finished copy from Scholastic in exchange for an honest review.

This story follows four different children during the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic. It's not easy making 4 different characters each sound unique and fleshing out their family dynamics but K. Ibura does a great job here. Taking care of younger siblings, dealing with a depressed parent, helping elderly neighbors, dealing with fighting parents, and processing anxiety were just a few of the issues this story tackles.

When the world shut down in March 2020, my world never shut down. While I heard about the kids struggling with online school I never stopped to think about how much they had to process with everything else going on. These children were at least lucky enough to have each other since they live in an apartment building even though they had to take precautions while interacting with each other. It also brought me back to just how little we knew about this virus back then which only added to the terror at the time. 

I liked that this book had the kids trying to help out in their local community. Social Justice is more than just issues of racial injustice and I feel like sometimes in stories aimed at Black kids there's a hyper focus on that. Of course it's impossible to tell a story about the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 and not mention the impact of George Floyd's death. So that is mentioned here with care. I never watched the video, I refused to. But the news was everyone and it was sparking major conversations. This story shows it through the eyes of children who are having uneasy conversations with their parents. The kids have been really processing a lot and we don't give them enough credit.