Beatrice and Croc Harry was an odd book. A lot of its aims were admirable. As a former black little girl I appreciate that Lawrence Hill wrote a story that specifically celebrates black girlhood with strong messages about taking pride in your blackness. However, I found his approach to tackling the questions of bigotry lacking.

To unpack that we need to get into the tone issues I had with this story. For the most part Beatrice and Croc Harry is a silly animal adventure story. We follow Beatrice an 11 year old who finds herself in a magical rainforest with no memory of how she got there. In the forest of Argilla Beatrice makes friends with talking animals and goes of a series of wacky adventures trying to find her way back home. While as an adult I didn't get much from this particular brand of childish whimsy I could see what a child could get out of it.

Beatrice and Croc Harry is also a story about a white supremacist terrorists who spend the book attempting to murder Beatrice and her friends as he attempts to impose his bigoted views onto the creatures of the forest. I'm not saying books for kids can't tackle heavy topics head on, especially because kids experience racism bigotry and gun violence. But these heavy themes that mainly occupy the back half of the novel are so discordant with the wacky silliness of the rest of the story that it was jarring to read. Even worse absurdly silly situations were occasionally also present in scenes directly depicting scenes of intense bigotry that, to me undermined the seriousness of the bigotry being depicted.

Further, I found the way Hill addressed white supremacy and racism in the story lacking. I understand this story is for children and therefore has to be simplified. But I do find the messaging of this story, that bigotry is produced by bad people who believe bad things, is an inadequate explanation of the causes of racism, even for children. While Hill attempts to add drops of nuance, most of that is in the last third of the novel and he barely explores concepts like structural racism despite alluding to ways societies can produce harm. This left me feeling like the book viewed racism as simply caused by bigoted people which was a little simplistic, yes, even for kids.

In the end Beatrice and Croc Harry was alright. Kids will probably appreciate the wacky silliness more than my grown ass self and its great to see black girls kicking but I'm overall pretty meh on the book.