Engaging, age-appropriate, and eye-opening.
Fictional profiles based on real girls from countries around the world illustrate some of the gender-based inequities that inspired girl activists to champion the International Day of the Girl through the United Nations.
Flora, in Brazil, begins to learn capoeira, a martial art that can help her defend herself against men who follow girls on the “long, unsafe road to and from school.” Hana, in Afghanistan, learns to read from her grandmother when girls are prohibited from going to school. Abuya, in Kenya, learns carpentry from her father, and when her sister stops going to high school because there is no private bathroom, she practices her skills with other girls until they can build an outhouse to help girls continue going to school. Other girls use STEM skills, advocacy, and positive personality traits and talents to address mental health, access to education, nutrition, and child marriage. Each spread is dedicated to one girl’s story: One side pictures the girl being active in her community in attractive pastel illustrations; the other side relays her story in a few concise, accessible paragraphs, with a sidebar naming her country and some other countries with similar issues. A header introduces her as “strong,” “smart,” “brave,” etc. This nonfiction volume introduces heavy issues in the context of child-led social change, a powerful method that inspires hope rather than despair. Endnotes offer a timeline of advocacy at the U.N. for girls and women and further information, including statistics, with web-based sources. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-24-inch double-page spreads viewed at 61% of actual size.)
Engaging, age-appropriate, and eye-opening. (Nonfiction. 6-10)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5253-0058-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
A unique angle on a watershed moment in the civil rights era.
The New Orleans school child who famously broke the color line in 1960 while surrounded by federal marshals describes the early days of her experience from a 6-year-old’s perspective.
Bridges told her tale to younger children in 2009’s Ruby Bridges Goes to School, but here the sensibility is more personal, and the sometimes-shocking historical photos have been replaced by uplifting painted scenes. “I didn’t find out what being ‘the first’ really meant until the day I arrived at this new school,” she writes. Unfrightened by the crowd of “screaming white people” that greets her at the school’s door (she thinks it’s like Mardi Gras) but surprised to find herself the only child in her classroom, and even the entire building, she gradually realizes the significance of her act as (in Smith’s illustration) she compares a small personal photo to the all-White class photos posted on a bulletin board and sees the difference. As she reflects on her new understanding, symbolic scenes first depict other dark-skinned children marching into classes in her wake to friendly greetings from lighter-skinned classmates (“School is just school,” she sensibly concludes, “and kids are just kids”) and finally an image of the bright-eyed icon posed next to a soaring bridge of reconciliation. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A unique angle on a watershed moment in the civil rights era. (author and illustrator notes, glossary) (Autobiographical picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-75388-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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