The Disney-princess version of a yoga picture book; undoubtedly marketable and predictably flawed.
Page by page, young readers are guided through a sun salutation, one of the most recognizable sequences in contemporary Western yoga.
Hinder’s exuberant style radiates a color palette warm as the morning sun. Subtle details seem to shimmer on the page. The text opens with wonderful simplicity, providing movement instruction and inviting readers to notice what they experience. It quickly becomes overworked, however, abandoning simplicity in favor of forced rhyme. The text alone does little to explain the movements, and the accompanying images are problematic as models. Like many yoga-themed picture books published recently, this work falls prey to the trap of presenting yoga sequences that are recognizable to adults without adapting the poses for young bodies. The plank and knee-chest-chin poses depicted, for example, require an inappropriate degree of core strength for the target audience. The single child depicted is overtly feminine in appearance. A contemplative, closed-mouth smile graces a tan-skinned face framed by flowing dark hair. While this version of feminine serenity will certainly appeal widely to yoga teachers and practitioners, it simultaneously reinforces stereotypical notions that yoga is an activity for “girls”—one limited to a certain kind of girl at that. Chipper animals flock to the child at every turn; one nearly expects the cast of characters to burst into song. Backmatter presents the flow of the salutation and discusses both the practice and meditation.
The Disney-princess version of a yoga picture book; undoubtedly marketable and predictably flawed. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68364-283-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sounds True
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
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