Beautiful

From School Library Journal PreS-Gr 1-This picture book is filled with wit and musings on what it means for a young girl to be beautiful. The illustrations evoke a feeling of uniqueness, independence, and strength, defining beauty through diversity, talents, and passions. Girls are playing football, eating messy oranges, digging in the mud, laughing at themselves, and flying like birds on swings. Drawings, vignettes, and square panels provide balance to the text. Simple sentences and phrases stir the imagination. Bold line drawings and rich colors bring a sense of wonder and personality to each girl. The wordplay is clever: "Beautiful girls know all about makeup," as the girls dress up as pirates with fake beards and mustaches. Each wears a pirate hat, carries a sword, and navigates her own boat on the high seas. "Beautiful girls…have a smart style" refers not to fashion sense but to a sense of discovery and exploration, as each page shows a young woman investigating bugs and plants and other girls building a robotic car or creating a science experiment. VERDICT This simple yet empowering story, best suited for one-on-one and small group sharing, is infused with examples of how beauty is defined in many ways.-Melissa Smith, Royal Oak Public Library, MI The tone is bold and forthright, as it needs to be to counter the ubiquitous other messages that tell girls how to behave, and the illustrations boast a multiracial cast and even girls playing basketball in wheelchairs. While this will appeal most to girls and their parents, there's no reason why boys should not enjoy it, too. -Booklist Stacy McAnulty is the author of Mr. Fuzz Buster Knows He's the Favorite, 101 Reasons Why I'm Not Taking a Bath, Excellent Ed, Beautiful , and Brave . She lives in Kernersville, NC, with her family. Joanne Lew-Vriethoff is the award-winning illustrator of Beautiful and Brave , as well as such books as Another Day as Emily, The Dancing Pancake , and Peace, Baby! She lives in Amsterdam with her family. Read more