More than just about anything else, I loved talking-animal books when I was growing up. I made early friends with Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad and Russell and Lillian Hoban’s Frances the badger, of course, before moving along to Rabbit Hill, Charlotte’s Web,The Mouse and the Motorcycle,The Wind in the Willows, and more. If the animals talked, I read it. I was astonished to learn (in my 40s) that some readers are, as one reviewer put it, “allergic to talking animals.” Fine; you do you—there are plenty of books for everybody.

Except, that is, for the kids of color, the queer kids and the kids in queer families, the kids with disabilities who, like me, love talking animals. Are there culturally conscious talking-animal books that offer furry mirrors to them? Look at the books I cited above. While it’s possible to read a queer subtext into Frog and Toad’s relationship, Frances’ family is as WASP-ishly normative as they come. Both the animals of Charlotte’s Web and Ralph S. Mouse fit right into an all-white world. The Wind in the Willows is peopled—animaled?—by analogs to rural English landowners, a mostly white population in Kenneth Grahame’s time. Rabbit Hill’s Phewie the skunk makes racist note of the “shape and color” of Sulphronia, the New Folks’ cook, and her characterization is almost certain to alienate black child readers.

The world of traditional literature, of course, offers hosts of talking animals, from Native American tales such as Chukfi Rabbit’s Big, Bad Bellyache, by Greg Rodgers and illustrated by Leslie Stall Widener (both Choctaw), to the antics of the African American trickster Br’er Rabbit, perhaps best brought to the page by Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkney in The Last Tales of Uncle Remus and other collections.

But moving into original middle-grade animal fantasies of today, the template seems still to be mostly an all-white one. In this issue, for instance, we review Kieran Larwood’sThe Beasts of Grimheart, the third in an epic-fantasy trilogy about rabbits that hits all the familiar Tolkien-esque notes. There are some notable exceptions in graphic novels, such as the Korean-speaking animals in Julie Kim’s Where’s Halmoni? and the Mexican American barrio animals in Cathy Camper and Raúl the Third’s Lowriders in Space and its sequels, but I can’t think of a single middle-grade prose work that offers Indigenous kids, kids of color, queer kids and kids in queer families, or kids with disabilities the sort of experience that I had in abundance.

There are a smidge more culturally conscious original picture books about talking animals. Gary Soto and Susan Guevara’s Chato’s Kitchen, with its Mexican American feline protagonist, was perhaps the most notable early offering, but neither that book nor its companions opened any floodgates. The most recent examples of talking-animal picture books that enjoy deeply rooted, culturally specific milieus that I can think of are Brenna Burns Yu’s Hazel and Twig, about Korean American mouse sisters, and Ojibwe creators Brenda J. Child and Jonathan Thunder’s Bowwow Powwow, about a human girl who dreams of Indigenous canine powwow participants.Looking at talking-animal books that are inclusive of readers with disabilities, there’s Rosemary Wells’ Felix Eats Up, about a guinea pig with selective eating disorder, but not loads of others. And queer kids and kids in queer families have Harvey Fierstein and Henry Cole’s The Sissy Duckling and J.J. Austrian and Mike Curato’s Worm Loves Worm. While this is not an exhaustive survey, it’s not the tip of any talking-animal iceberg, either.

To be sure, there are pitfalls aplenty in using animal characters as stand-ins for humans from marginalized populations—the possibilities for stereotyping both grotesque and subtle abound. But surely there are more #ownvoices creators who can craft authentic, respectful, and instantly recognizable animal mirrors for children reading from the margins.

It’s time to decolonize the animal kingdom, too.

Vicky Smith is the children’s editor.