An attractive pictorial offering stressing the universality of children’s play the world over.
An international array of color photographs presents children engaging in many kinds of joyful activities.
A child in Madagascar uses tin cans to create a toy car. An Ethiopian kid plucks a stringed instrument. Kids play foosball in Benin, chess in Spain, jacks in Guatemala, and table tennis in the Czech Republic. Two others play in the water with a large leaf and a basket in a photo captioned “Cooling off with a buddy in a river in Thailand.” Children in Mexico and South Africa have fun with bubbles. The South African photo gracing the cover shows a racially diverse group of children on a colorful play structure stretching out their arms to let the bubbles fly up into the sky. Each double-page spread includes a full-bleed photo and then two or three photos on the opposite page on a solid-color background, following the format of other books supporting the Global Fund for Children by this capable author pair. Short phrases in large type explain different ideas about play, and clear captions identify each activity and country. At the end, a map identifies each country’s location, and short paragraphs further explore the book’s themes. Most parts of the world are included, although there could be more from Latin America and the Middle East, and the Caribbean has been neglected.
An attractive pictorial offering stressing the universality of children’s play the world over. (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: June 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62354-163-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
A good-enough introduction to a contested festivity but one that’s not in step with the community it’s for.
An overview of the modern African-American holiday.
This book arrives at a time when black people in the United States have had intraracial—some serious, some snarky—conversations about Kwanzaa’s relevance nowadays, from its patchwork inspiration that flattens the cultural diversity of the African continent to a single festive story to, relatedly, the earnest blacker-than-thou pretentiousness surrounding it. Both the author and consultant Keith A. Mayes take great pains—and in painfully simplistic language—to provide a context that attempts to refute the internal arguments as much as it informs its intended audience. In fact, Mayes says in the endnotes that young people are Kwanzaa’s “largest audience and most important constituents” and further extends an invitation to all races and ages to join the winter celebration. However, his “young people represent the future” counterpoint—and the book itself—really responds to an echo of an argument, as black communities have moved the conversation out to listen to African communities who critique the holiday’s loose “African-ness” and deep American-ness and moved on to commemorate holidays that have a more historical base in black people’s experiences in the United States, such as Juneteenth. In this context, the explications of Kwanzaa’s principles and symbols and the smattering of accompanying activities feel out of touch.
A good-enough introduction to a contested festivity but one that’s not in step with the community it’s for. (resources, bibliography, glossary, afterword) (Nonfiction. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4263-2849-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: National Geographic Kids
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2017
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
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