Revolution! non-fiction for 8-12 year-olds by Joan Lennon

Like many of us, I grew up in a time of protest. In Canada, we marched against the war in Vietnam (I carried a placard with the catchy slogan END CANADA’S COMPLICITY!), for women’s lib, against racism, and for CND. My parents were part of the underground railway, getting kids out of the States to defy the draft. We lived just across the river from Detroit, and in the long hot summers you could see the smoke rising from the downtown race riots. Meanwhile, in primary school, we were taught Duck and Cover. The people who influenced me the most were busy saying No to different injustices and stupidities.

I think it was inevitable I would want to write a book about revolutions, though it’s taken a while!

Different kinds of revolutions. Different stories about change.

A bit of a blurb:

What does it take to change the world?

Sometimes it’s toppling systems and finding new ways to govern that give people a better chance.

Sometimes it’s challenging long-held beliefs and finding the courage to think differently.

Sometimes it’s coming up with ingenious inventions that transform our everyday lives.

The world we know today has been shaped by exceptional events, ideas and inventions. Revolution! tells the stories of ordinary people who made the extraordinary happen.

The constraints in writing history for this age group are … interesting. (If by interesting you mean frustrating and a right royal pain.) There wasn’t a chapter where I didn’t think, ‘What I really want to do here is write a book.’ A whole book – not just four pages which also had to accommodate a paltry maximum word count, illustrations, and enough space for some of the lengthier languages we hope it’ll be translated into. But always I needed to remember that this was a book to pique the reader’s interest, not to tell all. Teo’s illustrations helped with this so much.

One of the parts I particularly enjoyed writing were the slightly sideways questions at the end of each chapter. Questions like:

What use is music in a revolution?

Why is this revolution not talked about more? [Haiti]

Might India, Pakistan and Bangladesh reunite some day?

What makes something truly green?

I tried to answer in a way that might lead the reader to think again, and to ask MORE questions.

Which was always the take home message.

Revolution! written by Joan Lennon, illustrated by Teo Georgiev, published by Templar Books, due out 27 August 2026.

Other non-fiction books for 8-12 year-olds published by Templar Books:

Great Minds: 2500 Years of Thinkers and Philosophy written by Joan Haig and Joan Lennon, illustrated by Andre Ducci

Talking History: 150 Years of Speakers and Speeches written by Joan Haig and Joan Lennon, illustrated by Andre Ducci

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram