A worthy and original contribution to the growing kids’-yoga canon, even with its flaws.
If you want to play yoga, you have to know the rules: what to do more, what to do less, how to breathe, and how to move your body.
This picture-book import from Brazil brings with it a unique approach to the instruction of children’s yoga. It is written directly to the child audience, framing yoga as a game. A high point is the inclusion of the yamas and niyamas, the ethical guidelines of yoga that are often overlooked in favor of asana, the physical practice. This title prioritizes these principles, placing a thorough explanation of each before the asana section. Each pose is introduced with a brief story; on the following pages, mixed-media illustrations combine drawings of paper-white children with photographs of real light-skinned children, demonstrating the poses step by step. The overall effect is appealing, a blend of playful and practical. Unfortunately, the narrative falls short of this balance at times. Words and phrases such as “must,” “have to,” “always,” and “right way” show up frequently. While there’s much to be said for maintaining a disciplined practice, the wording is a bit rigid for beginning instruction to children. It’s tough to know if this tone matches with the authors’ intent or is the stylistic decision of the translator.
A worthy and original contribution to the growing kids’-yoga canon, even with its flaws. (Nonfiction. 6-10)Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61519-493-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: The Experiment
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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
Science at its best: informative and gross.
Why not? Because “IT’S FULL OF GERMS.”
Of course, Ben-Barak rightly notes, so is everything else—from your socks to the top of Mount Everest. Just to demonstrate, he invites readers to undertake an exploratory adventure (only partly imaginary): First touch a certain seemingly blank spot on the page to pick up a microbe named Min, then in turn touch teeth, shirt, and navel to pick up Rae, Dennis, and Jake. In the process, readers watch crews of other microbes digging cavities (“Hey kid, brush your teeth less”), spreading “lovely filth,” and chowing down on huge rafts of dead skin. For the illustrations, Frost places dialogue balloons and small googly-eyed cartoon blobs of diverse shape and color onto Rundgren’s photographs, taken using a scanning electron microscope, of the fantastically rugged surfaces of seemingly smooth paper, a tooth, textile fibers, and the jumbled crevasses in a belly button. The tour concludes with more formal introductions and profiles for Min and the others: E. coli, Streptococcus, Aspergillus niger, and Corynebacteria. “Where will you take Min tomorrow?” the author asks teasingly. Maybe the nearest bar of soap.
Science at its best: informative and gross. (Informational picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17536-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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