★ “An important piece of history in progress is captured here, and readers will not fail to be moved.” — School Library Journal (starred review) ★ “Bolstered with robust source notes, this is a flawless book about a senseless atrocity.” — Booklist (starred review) ★ “Brown offers up an intensely powerful graphic novel that humanizes an overwhelming tragedy. [His] masterful composition layers […]

2022 YALSA Non-Fiction Award Nominee!

Brown could be considered the format’s premiere historian for young readers; his exhaustive research is always coupled with an understanding of human motivation and an inviting, unostentatious visual style, all while connecting the past to the world we live in now. It’s never been more urgent than in his latest, which is nearly a direct sequel […]

Brown lays out the history of vaccinations in this relevant addition to the “Big Ideas That Changed the World” series. Narrator Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an early Western champion of inoculation, marches readers through the history of smallpox, a highly contagious disease that claimed millions of lives all over the world, leaving survivors disfigured and blind. Born […]

The Unwanted chosen as a Sibert Honors book! A portion of my awards speech at the ALA Mid Winter Conference.

The Unwanted wins 2019 YALSA AWARD for non-fiction! A portion of my awards speech.

Interview with Julie Danielson

There are over five million Syrian refugees around the world today, and each one has a unique story. Brown returns to the comics format of Drowned City (rev. 9/15) and The Great American Dust Bowl (rev. 11/13) to create a powerful history of the Syrian civil war, punctuated with the stories of many individual refugees.With the incorporation […]

Horn Book

THE UNWANTED Stories of the Syrian Refugees [STARRED REVIEW!] illus. by Don Brown. 112p. bibliog. maps. notes. HMH. Sept. 2018. Tr $18.99. ISBN 9781328810151.   Gr 8 Up–In the spring of 2011, a group of teenage boys are imprisoned and tortured for spray-painting “Down with the regime” on a Syrian wall. Thousands of citizens who […]