By Anabel Kindersley, Barnabas Kindersley
Every festival in this DK book belongs to a real, named child, photographed at their own celebration and telling you in their own words what the day means — Diwali, Hanukkah, Carnival, Hina Matsuri, laid out across the seasons.
Photographer-writers Anabel and Barnabas Kindersley spent a year traveling the world to meet children and ask them about the celebrations they take part in. Every spread is one real, named child at a real festival: a child at Halloween in Canada, another at Diwali in India, another at Hina Matsuri in Japan. Each child gets a large portrait, a scatter of smaller captioned photos of the food and clothes and rituals, and a few sentences in their own words about what the day means. These are documentary photographs of specific children, not illustrations of a culture in general. The festivals are grouped by season, so you travel the year and the globe at the same time.
A world-festivals book can slide easily into a parade of costumes and foods with nobody inside them. This one doesn't, because every festival belongs to a named child looking out of a photograph and telling you about their own day. The photographs are the pull: real faces tend to hold a child's attention in a way a drawing of a festival often can't. It works as much as a browsing basket as a straight-through read — a child can flip to whichever festival catches their eye and get the whole story of that day in one spread.