A recipe for success.
An uplifting ode to food’s tastes, functions, and varieties.
A child’s tummy rumbles one morning: “That’s your body saying, ‘Feed me!’” Subsequent spreads feature children engaged in various activities while snacking. A juice box gives a child energy to ride a scooter. Chips fuel doodling. A plate of cookies sits beside a youngster who gazes through a microscope. “All food has a purpose,” whether giving us “energy to wake up” or “strength to do hard things.” Best of all, food is yummy and will “make your taste buds sing.” Ehlert digs even deeper into food’s effects on the body as she briefly explains the functions of fats, carbs, proteins, and sugar. Short snippets about where food comes from and depictions of various mealtimes close out this smorgasbord of informational foodie fun. In addition to being a delightful contrast to the cadre of books that yuck someone else’s yum, this affirming title resists diet culture. A section of FAQs for grown-ups explains the concept of intuitive eating (listening to our body’s signals and eating the foods we’re craving) and the importance of food neutrality (not ascribing moral judgments such as unhealthy to food). The sheer variety of foods included in the colorful, cheerful illustrations is like a delicious sampler platter. A child with a cochlear implant, wheelchair users, and a youngster with a prosthetic arm round out the diverse cast.
A recipe for success. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781250854452
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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 hilarious “toot salute” to the gas we pass.
Continuing her valiant efforts to embrace the world’s less lovable contents from spiders and math to garbage and germs, Barton offers a new addition to her series.
Though the author/illustrator opens with a claim that farts have existed as long as humans—a howler she herself contradicts when she gets to introducing the far more ancient and “famously flatulent” termite—and even doubles down later with a similarly specious declaration about digestive system microbes, her overall assertion that passing gas is hilarious as well as natural and healthy is inarguable. After all, she notes, the oldest joke on record, going back nearly 4,000 years, is fart-related (she doesn’t repeat it, alas). The illustrations reinforce both themes; between endpapers featuring visual representations of nearly two dozen distinctive poots, each labeled with a synonym for the act, a serious young lecturer provides a simple discourse on the causes and contents of farts as well as about animals that also produce them or, like sloths and birds, don’t. The narrator is frequently derailed by a pesky brother’s wisecracks and billowing clouds of noxiously hued funk. In the end, though, both tan-skinned children wind up “feeling the fart love,” and perhaps readers will, too. Other human figures in the art are racially diverse, and one uses a wheelchair.
A hilarious “toot salute” to the gas we pass. (fascinating facts on flatulence, further resources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593693773
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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