The Case for Loving: The Fight for Interracial Marriage
by Selina Alko; illus. by 
Sean Qualls and Selina Alko
Primary   Levine/Scholastic   32 pp.
1/15   978-0-545-47853-3   $18.99

The 1967 Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage throughout the country is here given a picture-book accounting. Richard Loving was white, Mildred Jeter’s skin was a “creamy caramel”; despite their different racial backgrounds, they fell in love and married, only to be arrested for miscegenation when they returned to their Virginia hometown after the wedding. It’s a story about adults and with potentially much legalese, but Alko does a mostly admirable job of shaping the love story and the legal proceedings for a young audience. There is, however, a haziness about skin color and racial identity throughout the book that can be unclear, with lyrical references to “people of every shade” bumping confusingly with “colored,” and “black”; meanwhile, the term “interracial marriage” is used but not defined. While the book is honest about the obstacles the Lovings faced, its message and tone are optimistic, the feel-good atmosphere reinforced by the pencil, paint, and collage illustrations by Alko and Qualls (themselves partners in an interracial marriage). With soft, worn shades providing a gently old-timey aura, even a scene like the police busting in on the sleeping couple is sufficiently dramatic without being frightening. Frequent festoons of hearts and flowers, nice but overly decorative, help, too. Sources and a suggested reading list are appended.

From the May/June 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.