By Pat Zietlow Miller
A girl tries to be kind to a classmate having an awful morning, gets it wrong, and spends the rest of the book working out what she should have done.
Tanisha spills grape juice down the front of her new dress at school, and everyone looks. The girl telling the story wants to help. She says the first friendly thing that comes into her head, that purple is her favorite color, and Tanisha walks away from her. So she's left standing there with the question the whole book runs on: what would being kind have actually looked like? She turns it over. Kind is saying someone's name right. Kind is giving a neighbor cookies. Kind is the hard one, standing next to someone when the rest of the room isn't. She wonders whether her small thing plus somebody else's small thing could add up and travel, out of the classroom and across the world. Then she picks something small and does it: she paints Tanisha a picture.
Most books on this shelf hand a child a kind act that works. This one opens with a kind act that flops, which is closer to what your child has probably lived. Most of us have tried to help someone and somehow made it more awkward, not less. That honest start is what makes the rest of the book land. And the answer it settles on is deliberately unglamorous. Being kind here isn't a grand rescue. It's noticing, waiting, and doing one small thing that costs you a little. Jen Hill's pictures do the reaching, the small figure imagining her kindness spreading out over the rooftops and away. It's a thinking-out-loud book more than a plot, so it goes better read with someone than handed over alone.