Lyrical and poignant, Loving Kindness encourages us to be tender with ourselves and others, and to open our hearts to the world. This vibrant picture book celebrates connection, compassion, and life.
Ages 4 to 8
This soothingly reiterative picture book emphasizes an individual’s innate worth, employing a simple refrain encompassing everyone’s ability for love, the validity and importance of making mistakes, and basic actions such as dreaming, breathing air, feeling sun, and overall connection to the earth. Underwood replaces the subject of each simple sentence with “you,” “she,” “they,” and “everyone” in turn: “Everyone is a blessing./ Everyone is beautiful just as they are./ Everyone is loved, and everyone loves.// Everyone makes mistakes,/ and it’s okay to make mistakes,/ because that’s how we learn.” Hopgood’s bold, multilayered artwork, rendered in mixed media, emulates stamps amid concentrated splashes of color, with dot-eyed, brown-skinned humans of varying ages and smiling animals against surreal natural landscapes. An affirmative read-aloud ideal for the youngest readers. - Publisher's Weekly, starred review
A meditative picture book devoted to honoring a sense of oneness with the world.
The book opens with a direct address to an unnamed baby of color: “You are a blessing. You are beautiful just as you are. You are loved, and you love.” Subsequent pages show the baby cradled and nurtured in an extended family. The art style is arrestingly simple, with human characters akin to those found in Christian Robinson’s work, though the colors overall, particularly backgrounds, are generally more saturated than his typically are. Following this celebration of the baby, the text’s refrains repeat with a new pronoun, she, to focus on a big sister - perhaps the baby has grown, or perhaps this is the baby’s older sibling; it’s open to interpretation. After the pages devoted to her, the pronoun shifts to they to introduce horses who join the children in the brightly colored illustrations. Finally, spreads about “everyone” bring the children together with a group of animals on “the earth that connects us all” - a phrase that concludes each segment. In the final iteration, two enormous green hands cradle children and animals, including lion, polar bear, giraffe, kangaroo and more, as whales, and other sea creatures swim beneath. The effect is to create a peaceable kingdom of loving kindness that acknowledges interconnectedness in soothing, gentle spreads. - Kirkus Reviews
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