Ask for children's books with Black characters and you will get a list. Ask for children's books where a Black child is the hero — the one who wants something, who is frightened, who decides — and the list gets noticeably shorter. The distinction is not pedantry. A child can appear on many pages and still not be the person the story is about. Three things worth checking When you are standing in a bookshop with limited time, these are quick and they tell you most of what you need. Whose problem drives the plot? If the Black child is helping somebody else solve theirs, they are a supporting character, however lovely the illustrations. Is the story about being Black, or is the hero simply Black? Books about racism and history matter enormously. But a four-year-old also needs a book where a child who looks like them is just having an adventure, and their skin is not the subject. Does the setting have specifics? "Africa" is not a place. Kakum, Cape Coast, Accra, Kumasi are places. Specificity is the difference between a backdrop and a world. The hair test A smaller thing that tells you a surprising amount: look at how the hair is drawn. Coils, locs, cornrows, a puff held with a band — these take an illustrator real attention. When hair is rendered as a dark shape with no structure, it usually means the book was drawn for a general audience and adjusted, rather than drawn for this child from the start. Children notice their own hair on a page before they notice anything else about the drawing. For diaspora families in particular If you are raising children away from the continent, there is an extra layer. Your child may see Black characters in British or American books and still never see anywhere their family is from. The heritage half goes missing even when the representation box is ticked. This is worth being deliberate about. A story set in a real African place, with real names and real food and a real forest, does something a generically diverse book cannot: it makes somewhere specific feel like it belongs to them. Where we fit We built Gli Books around exactly that gap. Our first title puts your own child — illustrated from a photograph, with their hair and their skin tone and their name on the cover — on the canopy walkway at Kakum in Ghana, frightened of the height and crossing anyway. It is not the only good answer to this problem, and we would rather you found a shelf full of them. But if you have been looking for the book where your child is unmistakably the hero, this is what we make.