Dishes up a decidedly well-earned tribute.
A Detroit cafeteria worker acts on her belief that kids deserve delicious, nutritious food.
Determined to replace the beige fare that the 46,000 Detroit students in her charge usually found on their lunch trays with more nourishing food—and canny enough to know that she’d have to persuade them to eat it, too—Betti Wiggins started small. Goodbye, iceberg lettuce. Hello, romaine! Out with soggy white potato french fries, in with baked sweet potato fries! Soon a salad bar was stocked with fresh produce….and a lunchroom protest broke out when one principal tried to limit it to upper graders. Eighty school gardens later, plus expanded breakfast and dinner programs, Wiggins was ready for a bigger challenge. Hello, Houston! Not only are the students surrounding the brown-skinned Wiggins in Uroda’s illustrations racially diverse, including one with vitiligo; their expressions also encompass a broad range of emotion, from listlessness to skepticism, dawning interest, and finally big smiles as floating images of fresh fruits and veggies give way to flashing stars and confetti. Nargi closes with a note on her still-active subject’s later achievements and a capsule history of U.S. school lunch programs that includes a provocative nod to those sponsored by the Black Panthers.
Dishes up a decidedly well-earned tribute. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781534113251
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sleeping Bear Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses.
An NBA star pays tribute to the influence of his grandfather.
In the same vein as his Long Shot (2009), illustrated by Frank Morrison, this latest from Paul prioritizes values and character: “My granddad Papa Chilly had dreams that came true,” he writes, “so maybe if I listen and watch him, / mine will too.” So it is that the wide-eyed Black child in the simply drawn illustrations rises early to get to the playground hoops before anyone else, watches his elder working hard and respecting others, hears him cheering along with the rest of the family from the stands during games, and recalls in a prose afterword that his grandfather wasn’t one to lecture but taught by example. Paul mentions in both the text and the backmatter that Papa Chilly was the first African American to own a service station in North Carolina (his presumed dream) but not that he was killed in a robbery, which has the effect of keeping the overall tone positive and the instructional content one-dimensional. Figures in the pictures are mostly dark-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-250-81003-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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