wee rebel books

Wee Rebel Books was founded in 2017 as a direct reaction to the political climate of the nation and the world, a beacon of positive action for kids and families that promotes not just loving difference, but standing up for it also.

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John and Jana and Manic D Press originally collaborated in 2012 on the groundbreaking picture book A Rule Is To Break: A Child’s Guide To Anarchy, which took radical political ideas and transformed them into a child’s experience in a way that didn’t limit the young reader to one political philosophy, but gave them the tools to apply the principles to everyday life. This was followed-up in 2013 by Happy Punks 1-2-3: A Counting Story, which reframed a perceived rebellious counter culture as a community and illustrated each individual as a building block in that community. Difference is strength, and togetherness through difference is both power and love — those were the lessons of these two titles.

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Four years later, John and Jana and Manic D Press got back together again with two new titles and the umbrella of Wee Rebel Books, which unites the first two titles with the upcoming Gorilla Gardener: …. And We Say No!: A Child’s Guide To Resistance as  a literary community devoted to positive defiance in service of a better world for everyone.

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The idea of Wee Rebel Books is simple. We don’t want to lecture children, we want to talk about social and political ideas to kids in a way that matters to them. We want to present kindness without preciousness, forthrightness without pushiness. Wee Rebel Books aims to offer children truthfulness that doesn’t frighten or discourage, but helps to ignite a hopeful energy that can be shared with their families and community. 

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In presenting progressive and radical ideas to children, we try to make them sound not like they’ve sprung out of academia, but as living things that breathe like the humanity they are supposed to be in service of. These ideas are something you should be, not just talk about. And the books should be approachable, fun, and willing to get as dirty they expect their readers to get. We are all in this together — authors, publishers, readers — and Wee Rebel Books wants to reflect that. We aren’t here to tell you anything. We’re all just here to live these books together.

These are the guidelines we set out for ourselves with our new Wee Rebel Books, as well as though to come. We want the books to reflect the best of what we have encountered in the world, a singular mix of kindness and kickassedness that we believe can change the world.