By Peter H. Reynolds
A boy who loves to draw stops the day his brother laughs at one picture, until his little sister shows him a whole new way to make art that doesn't have to be right, only 'ish'.
Ramon loves to draw. He draws anything, everything, all the time, joyfully, until the day his older brother Leon leans over his shoulder, laughs, and says his drawing doesn't look like anything. That one laugh is all it takes. Suddenly Ramon can't draw a single thing without seeing everything wrong with it. He crumples picture after picture, chasing a 'right' he can never quite reach, and finally he gives up drawing altogether. Then he discovers his little sister Marisol has been rescuing his crumpled-up drawings and taping them to her bedroom wall. When he protests that one doesn't even look like a proper vase, she says it looks vase-ish, and just like that Ramon is free again, drawing sun-ish, house-ish, feeling-ish, making art that doesn't have to be perfect to be his.
This is the book for the child whose whole spark can be put out by one careless comment, the one who stops drawing, stops trying, because it didn't come out 'right.' What makes it work is the word it gives them. 'Ish' is a tiny, portable tool a child can actually carry around, permission to make something roughly, approximately, in the spirit of the thing, without measuring it against a perfect version in their head. Ramon's slide from joy into crumpling-and-quitting will be painfully familiar to a perfectionist, and his way back out, seeing his own work through his sister's loving eyes, is the exact turn they need.