What Emotions Jason Reynolds’ Young Adult Novels Convey? A Sentiment Analysis

“The All-White world of children’s books” (Larrick, 1965) is still mainly White and heavily skewed in one direction. Black children are either entirely absent from the books or misrepresented stories. Although there has been a notable increase publishing African American over past several years, “characters color [often] limited to townships occasional historical that concern themselves with legacies civil rights slavery” (Myers, 2014). These characters “are never given pass card traverse lands adventure, curiosity, imagination personal growth” With focus on Young Adult books, this paper, we show how Natural Language Processing (NLP) sentiment analysis can be used as alternate tools identify emotional patterns diverse YA novels. We follow approach for emotion suggested by Mohammad (2012) use manually created lexicons contain Plutchik’s eight basic emotions. Also, measure words changes through course our selected demonstrate flow emotions well associated sample books.