By Grace Byers
A rhyming string of affirmations, one child telling herself and everyone around her that she is exactly enough.
There's no plot here, and that's the point. A young Black girl moves through her day while the words build a quiet, rhyming case for her own worth, that she's like the sun, here to shine, like the bird, here to soar, that she can be strong and gentle both, that she'll be kind even to those who aren't kind back. By the last pages it has gathered a whole diverse group of children into one idea, that each of them, and everyone else, is enough.
Grace Byers wrote it as the book she wished she'd had, and it does one thing beautifully, it hands a child language for their own worth before the world gets a chance to hand them doubt. For a nervous or hard-on-themselves child it's a bit of medicine. In a classroom it becomes the anchor text you come back to all year. And the art, warm and full of children who don't often see themselves at the center of a book, does half the work.