Review by New York Times Review
CAN a picture book actually teach children about kindness? Sure, the goal is worthy. Yet pushing a moral too hard takes the life out of a story and the energy out of an audience. In time for National Anti-Bullying Awareness Month, three new books nonetheless venture onto this tricky terrain. "Each Kindness," by the Newbery Honor-winning author Jacqueline Woodson ("After Tupac and D Foster," "Feathers," "Show Way"), has beautiful watercolors and prose, strong characters and a plot that pricks the conscience. Maya, the new girl in Chloe's class, wants to be friends but she wears old dresses and eats odd food. "On that first day, Maya turned to me and smiled," Chloe tells us. "But I didn't smile back." Chloe's coldness persists as Maya tries to woo her over the weeks that follow, with offerings like jacks, a deck of cards, pick-up sticks and a tattered doll. Each time, Chloe and her friends refuse to play, giving Maya the nickname Never New for her secondhand clothes, and laughing while she jumps rope alone. As I read this description to my 7-year-old niece, my mind flashed to the hurt face of a sixth grader I interviewed for a book I'm writing on bullying. She looked down at her stained shirt as she related the embarrassing question an affluent, fashion-forward girl had asked her: "Where do you buy your clothes?" Woodson gets it right in conveying this small but corrosive cruelty. I expected Woodson to show Chloe getting her act together. Instead, the day after she and her friends start calling Maya Never New, she sees their victim's seat in class is empty. The teacher, meanwhile, asks each student to drop a stone into a bowl of water, think of a kind act they've done and watch the ripples fan out, as if into the world. Chloe can think of no act of kindness to contribute. She keeps trying in the pages that follow, but she doesn't come up with one, and Maya doesn't come back. And so the book ends on a note of missed opportunity and wistful regret. This is pretty tough-minded for a children's story. In "Yoko," the beloved picture book by Rosemary Wells, a Japanese cat whose classmates mock her lunch ("Yuckorama!") gets help when her teacher invites the class to International Food Day. Everyone brings a homey specialty, a raccoon named Timothy tries Yoko's sushi and the next day they push their desks together to open a sushi-and-sandwich restaurant. My sons asked to read "Yoko" over and over again when they were of picture-book age. By contrast, my young niece had to be coaxed into giving "Each Kindness" a second try. Still, precisely because the book is unflinching, I can imagine it doing good in the hands of a wise parent or teacher. It's a junior companion to "The Hundred Dresses," Eleanor Estes's unforgettable 1944 classic about the closet full of clothes a poor girl imagines for herself, to her classmates' consternation. By telling Maya's story from Chloe's vantage point, Woodson makes kids think about how failing to show empathy boomerangs. I was less drawn to "Because Amelia Smiled." David Ezra Stein's crayon art is playful and vivid. But his story amounts to a takeoff on "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie," without the mouse and his spirit of sly fun. Amelia is a little girl who smiles on her street in New York. A neighbor sees her and bakes a batch of cookies for her grandson in Mexico - and we are off around the globe, propelled from one happy act of good will to the next. Stein ("Interrupting Chicken") covers lots of diversity bases, with characters that include an African-American teacher, a Mexican kickboxer, a rumba queen in Israel, an ex-clown in Paris and a pizza maker back in New York. The book is an ode to the spread of good karma. The problem is that the traveling acts of kindness don't add up to more than a loosely connected set of pleasant images. There's nothing the least bit objectionable, but there's also little that's memorable. My audience of 3- to 7-year-olds followed along for the most part, but they weren't sure who was who or why they should care, even when the journey circled back to Amelia To succeed, a picture book has to offer something or someone to laugh at, or root for or struggle alongside. "The Forgiveness Garden" the made-up origin story for a real garden planted in Beirut after the Lebanese civil war, goes for struggle. The author, Lauren Thompson ("One Starry Night," "Polar Bear Night"), imagines a long-simmering conflict between two villages, Vayam and Gamte, the kind in which no one remembers the cause. When a Gamte boy, Karune, throws a stone that hits a Vayam girl, Sama, his act of violence stirs calls for vengeance. The book's biblical tone does not shy away from words like revenge and hatred. When Sama is handed a stone to throw at Karune, she looks at the villagers around her and sees "their faces were like hers had been, hardened with anger and fear and hate." Sama takes the turn toward compassion that Chloe did not. She throws her stone to the ground and proposes the construction of a forgiveness garden. Villagers from both sides slowly join her, piling up stones to build a garden wall. They ask Sama questions familiar to any truth and reconciliation committee: "Must we forget all that has happened?" "Must we apologize?" Sama says the garden will help them find the answers, a response that's a little gauzy, but age-appropriate for the book's intended audience. When it comes time to step into the garden, it is Karune who joins Sama. "They began to talk," Thompson writes. "What do you think they said?" That feels like the right open-ended conclusion. I can see "The Forgiveness Garden" resonating especially with children in war-torn or conflict-ridden communities. It opens a door to peacemaking and invites children to imagine for themselves what's on the other side. And isn't that often the first step toward kindness? Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate and author of "Sticks and Stones," a book about bullying coming out in February.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 14, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Starting with the title, this quiet, intense picture book is about the small actions that can haunt. As in collaborations such as Coming on Home Soon (2004), Woodson's spare, eloquent free verse and Lewis' beautiful, spacious watercolor paintings tell a story for young kids that will touch all ages. In a first-person voice, Chloe speaks about how a new girl in class, Maya, gets the empty seat next to her and tries to be friends. But Chloe and her clique will have none of the poor white kid in her old ragged clothes, and their meanness intensifies after Maya asks to play with them. Then Maya's family moves away, and she is forever gone, leaving Chloe without the chance to put things right. Chloe's teacher spells out lessons of kindness, but the story is most powerful in the scenes of malicious bullying in the multiracial classroom and in the school yard. It is rare to tell a story of cruelty from the bully's viewpoint, and both the words and pictures powerfully evoke Chloe's shame and sorrow over the kindness she has not shown, as she looks at the empty seat next to her in the classroom, and then, alone and troubled, throws a stone in the water and watches the ripples move out and away. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The combined talents and star power of Woodson and Lewis will undoubtably create plenty of pre-pub. buzz.--Rochman, Hazel Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
When a new and clearly impoverished girl named Maya shows up at school ("Her coat was open and the clothes beneath it looked old and ragged"), Chloe and her friends brush off any attempt to befriend her. Even when Maya valiantly-and heartbreakingly-tries to fit in and entice the girls to play with her, she is rejected. Then one day, Maya is gone, and Chloe realizes that her "chance of a kindness" is "more and more forever gone." Combining realism with shimmering impressionistic washes of color, Lewis turns readers into witnesses as kindness hangs in the balance in the cafeteria, the classroom, and on the sun-bleached playground asphalt; readers see how the most mundane settings can become tense testing grounds for character. Woodson, who collaborated with Lewis on The Other Side and Coming On Home Soon, again brings an unsparing lyricism to a difficult topic. The question she answers with this story is one that can haunt at any age: what if you're cruel to someone and never get the chance to make it right? Ages 5-8. Agent: Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency. Illustrator's agent: Dwyer & O'Grady. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 2-Maya is the new girl. Her clothes are worn and her shoe is broken, but she offers a shy "hello" to the class. Their response is as cold as the snow outside. Chloe and her "best friends that year" reject Maya's continued warm offerings of friendship, even as they watch her play alone at recess. Maya is absent the day the class has a lesson in kindness. When Chloe cannot come up with one example of her own kind behavior, she vows to smile back at Maya and "make the world a little better." But Maya suddenly moves away and Chloe's opportunity to be kind to her is gone forever. In an unusual twist for a book for this age group, Woodson does not let Chloe off the hook. She cannot undo her meanness to Maya, making the message all the more powerful. A few wordy phrases do not diminish the doleful beauty of the story. Nikki M. James's narration conveys the varying personalities, sweet and soft for Maya, strong and straightforward for Chloe. Soft music and playground noise, even malicious giggling, enhance the recording and the message. One track offers page turn signals.-Jane Newschwander, Fluvanna County Public Schools, VA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Narrator Chloe turns her back when new student Maya, clothed in what appear to be thrift-store oddments, is seated next to her in class. At recess, Chloe pointedly gathers her best friends to share schoolyard secrets, ignoring Maya's advances of friendship. Maya plays alone, seemingly unbowed by the continuing ostracism, until one day, suddenly, she's gone. Only then does teacher Ms. Albert prompt the class to share with one another stories about "what kind things we had done" -- acts that might have "rippled out" like the pebbles they drop into a bowl of water as they describe their good deeds; meanwhile, a silent, belatedly thoughtful Chloe regrets "each kindness I had never shown." Woodson's affecting story, with its open ending, focuses on the withholding of friendship rather than outright bullying, and Lewis reflects the pensive mood in sober watercolors, suggesting Maya's troubled courage and Chloe's repentance in subtly detailed portraits. Like Ms. Albert's little stones, the book is a good conversation starter. joanna rudge long (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Woodson and Lewis' latest collaboration unfolds with harsh beauty and the ominousness of opportunities lost. Narrator Chloe is a little grade-school diva who decides with casual hubris that the new girl, Maya, is just not good enough. Woodson shows through Chloe's own words how she and her friends completely ignore Maya, with her raggedy shoes and second-hand clothes, rebuffing her every overture. Readers never learn precisely why Chloe won't return Maya's smile or play jacks or jump rope with her. Those who have weathered the trenches of childhood understand that such decisions are not about reason; they are about power. The matter-of-fact tone of Chloe's narration paired against the illustrations' visual isolation of Maya creates its own tension. Finally, one day, a teacher demonstrates the ripple effect of kindness, inspiring Chloe--but Maya disappears from the classroom. Suddenly, Chloe is left holding a pebble with the weight of a stone tablet. She gets a hard lesson in missed opportunities. Ripples, good and bad, have repercussions. And sometimes second chances are only the stuff of dreams. Lewis dazzles with frame-worthy illustrations, masterful use of light guiding readers' emotional responses. Something of the flipside to the team's The Other Side (2001), this is a great book for teaching kindness. (Picture book. 5-8)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
