In The Sonar System, a new children’s picture book by singer and MC Ras Mykha, the planets orbit a gigantic, pulsating speaker instead of a sun. The story is simple, familiar and classic: the conflict between two peoples (the Tesfarians and the Malake) who once lived in peace, with an overarching message of acceptance. What makes this book noteworthy is that it features black characters and focuses on diversity, which is rare in children’s literature.

We still live in a world where you’re more likely to encounter a Gruffalo than a BME person when you open a children’s picture book. Malorie Blackman may be the UK’s first black children’s laureate and, yes, not all of Hogwarts’ pupils are white, but there’s still a long way to go.

Last year, the author Walter Dean Myers wrote a piece for the New York Times asking “Where are the people of colour in children’s books?”, responding to a study that revealed that, of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, only 93 were about black people. A UK campaign called #WeNeedDiverseBooks, which The Sonar System supports, launched a couple of months later.

Things haven’t changed much since I was a child, consuming book after book and never once encountering a character who looked like me. The closest I could get was Anne of Green Gables – a white, Canadian orphan growing up on rural Prince Edward Island. I was a middle-class, brown Londoner with two thoroughly present parents, but at least Anne looked a little “different”; she had red hair.

The lack of representation was so complete that I didn’t even notice it until I picked up a copy of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye at the age of 12 and my whole world cracked open. “What this demonstrates,” the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said during her 2009 Ted talk on the danger of a single story, “is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children.” It also demonstrates why we all benefit from books like The Sonar System (which is out now and available from One Love Books). We need diverse books because we live in a diverse world.

• This article was amended on 3 August 2015. We originally stated: ‘What makes this book noteworthy is that it’s written by a black person, features black characters and focuses on black experience.’