Mae Makes a Way: The True Story of Mae Reeves, Hat & History Maker

Made in collaboration with the Smithsonian, where the subject’s shop has been partially re-created, this picture book offers a comprehensive, sincere history of Philadelphia milliner Mae Reeves (1912–2016), an extraordinary Black woman who “made a way out of no way.” Beginning with Reeves’s childhood and young adulthood in segregated Georgia, the creators chronicle how she became both a successful entrepreneur—her “Mae of Philadelphia” hats crowned celebrities and countless church ladies—and a force for change, working for the NAACP and turning her shop into a polling place. Pippins’s editorial-styled vignettes and portraits, as stylish as their subject, portray the intersection of Reeves’s domestic and professional lives in flat, blocky hues, while lengthy text by Rhuday-Perkovich foregrounds the figure’s history and legacy, “Black women were often treated as though they were invisible.... Hats were a way for these queens to be SEEN, shining a light on the dignity they always had.” Back matter includes interviews with Reeves’s daughter and a museum’s head of collections. Ages 7–10. (May)