For most of the history of children’s publishing, kids who didn’t see themselves reflected on the page simply learned to identify with characters who looked, lived, and thought nothing like them. That expectation has shifted noticeably over the past sixteen years, and Greg Soros has built much of his own catalog, “The Kindness Chronicles” series especially, around closing that gap rather than waiting for the wider industry to close it first.
A Shift Two Decades in the Making
The change didn’t happen overnight, and Greg Soros is quick to point out that it remains far from finished. When he started publishing with “Shelly Finds Her Voice,” conversations about representation in children’s books were mostly happening at the margins of the industry, in smaller conference panels and niche newsletters rather than boardrooms. Sensitivity reading, now a standard part of his process on every project, wasn’t yet common practice at most publishing houses.
Representation as Craft, Not a Checklist
Greg Soros treats diversity in his stories primarily as a writing problem, with marketing considerations a distant second. “Different Kinds of Brave,” his 2018 book about a girl on the autism spectrum, worked because her autism shaped how she moved through the plot rather than functioning as a label attached to her from the opening page. The book was built alongside child development experts and readers with direct experience of autism. The research shows up in small, specific details. There’s no single explanatory scene near the end doing all the work.
This craft-first instinct carries through “The Kindness Chronicles” too, where a group of elementary school friends from different backgrounds navigate ordinary conflicts. A disagreement over a class project. A misunderstanding between neighbors. None of it is treated as though a single character’s identity were the entire reason for their presence in the story.
What Still Needs to Change
Greg Soros doesn’t oversell how far the industry has come, and he’s fairly blunt about where the gaps remain. Diverse protagonists show up more often in picture books for younger readers than in early chapter books and middle-grade fiction, where representation still lags noticeably behind. International markets carry their own version of the problem too, since translation and distribution decisions sometimes reintroduce the very narrowness that domestic publishers spent years correcting.
His current projects, including a middle-grade series that weaves cultural diversity in alongside climate change and digital citizenship, are partly an attempt to push representation further up the age range than picture books typically reach. A companion nonfiction series, profiling children throughout history who made a difference in their own communities, is being built with the same principle in mind: real specificity over broad symbolism, whatever the reader’s age.
Kids don’t stop needing mirrors at age eight. The shelf for readers between nine and twelve still has plenty of empty space left to fill, and Greg Soros seems in no hurry to let someone else fill it first.
