Great Reads from Great Places:
Young Readers

Each year Massachusetts selects a special book for young readers to represent our commonwealth in the “Great Reads About Great Places” program. The affiliated centers for the book promote their selections at their booths in the Roadmap to Reading section of National Book Festival. Here are the books we have featured since the program began in 2002. To read more about it and see the books suggested by other centers for the book, visit Great Reads from Great Places at the Library of Congress.

Click each book to learn more and/or to purchase them at the Mass Center for the Book Shop on Bookshop.org and support local, independent bookstores as well as Mass Center for the Book.

2024 Great Reads Selection

When you think about the beginning of the American story, what comes to mind? People in buckled hats and shoes stepping off the Mayflower, eager to start a new country? In reality, the Pilgrims didn’t arrive to a vast, empty land ready to be developed. They disembarked to find communities of people living in harmony with the land they had inhabited for thousands of years, and they quickly disrupted everything they saw. This part of our past is full of injustice, but it’s also full of heroic rebellion and persistence.

Told from the perspective of the New England Indigenous Nations who have been on this land since the earliest days of this country, this is the true story of how America as we know it today began.

Meet the Author

Linda Coombs (Aquinnah Wampanoag) is an author and historian from the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah, and lives in the Wampanoag community of Mashpee on Cape Cod, MA. Coombs began her museum career at the Boston Children's Museum, and later worked in their Native American Program. She and her colleague Paulla Dove Jennings (Narragansett) wrote children's books for a museum series highlighting aspects of southern New England tribal cultures. Coombs also worked for 30 years in the Wampanoag Indigenous Program (WIP) of Plimoth Plantation, including 15 years as WIP's Associate Director; and 9 years at the Aquinnah Cultural Center. Presently she does independent museum consulting and cultural presentations.