The little book of joy

In this picture book adaptation of 2016's The Book of Joy, the Nobel Peace Prize winners recall childhoods growing up "on opposite sides of the world." Mixed-media art by López (The Year We Learned to Fly) initially evokes the specificity of the narrators' respective homelands, soon moving into more metaphoric idyllic settings, rendered in radiant hues, that spotlight rainbow-like ribbons and are populated by a global cast of joyful children. In initial spreads, readers see young Tutu in a sunbaked town ("One of us grew up in a little house"), while the young Dalai Lama roams a monastic-seeming building's expanses ("One of us grew up in a big house"). Though loneliness and isolation seem to initially define their respective lives ("Both of us wished for a friend"), each discovers that by opening their hearts to the beauty around them, they become more resilient and hopeful. "If you just focus on the thing that is making you sad, then sadness is all you see," reads a spread that shows a zoomed-in moment of sadness followed by fuller, more hopeful context: "But if you look around, you will see that joy is everywhere." With unalloyed optimism, the pages earnestly lean into the creators' comforting promise: "As it spreads from person to person, the world will fill with JOY." Ages 3--7. (Sept.)

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) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.