Not the strongest in the series, but a good introduction to keeping the mind and body active and healthy.
Ritchie’s five friends learn about keeping their minds and bodies fit and healthy as they prepare for a swim meet.
This latest in the Exploring Our Community series follows Pedro, Sally, Nick, Yulee, and Martin as they practice once more before tomorrow’s race, have fun together, and meet an Olympic swimmer. Using proper equipment for your sport, warming up, understanding where you need to improve and setting goals for yourself, decreasing anxiety and stress, hand-washing, eating a variety of healthy foods, and engaging in deep breathing and visualization are among the topics briefly addressed. Ritchie emphasizes throughout the importance of the mind-body connection: How one feels influences the other. Backmatter includes some fun things kids can do with their friends to achieve their 60 to 90 minutes of activity each day and a list of defined terms. This entry is not as seamless as See What We Eat (2017) in terms of either the flow of the story or folding in the learning without seeming didactic. The story is thin, but the relationships among the five kids (four with light skin and varying hair colors, one with dark skin and hair) continue to be a highlight. They cheer for and support one another and truly enjoy being together and having fun.
Not the strongest in the series, but a good introduction to keeping the mind and body active and healthy. (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77138-967-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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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