Courtney Weikle‑Mills, "Sugarcoated Ethics: Children’s Literature and Atlantic Enslavement" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)

What if children’s literature was never as innocent as we imagine?

In Sugarcoated Ethics: Children’s Literature and Atlantic Enslavement (Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2026), the relationship between childhood

reading and Atlantic slavery is brought into sharp focus. The book

argues that children’s literature did not merely emerge alongside the

plantation economy; it was deeply shaped by it. Sugar, sweetness, moral

instruction, and domestic comfort were all tied to systems of

enslavement and colonial trade, even as the violence behind them was

softened or erased in stories for young readers.

The book also

examines how ideas of white civility shaped childhood. White children,

particularly girls, were cast as symbols of innocence, refinement, and