This bi-weekly #Windows/Mirrors series of book reviews, inspired by the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement, offers children’s books created by or about people of diversity.

“And every day after that…I looked away and didn’t smile back.”

Each Kindness, by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by E. B. Lewis, Nancy Paulsen Books (An Imprint of Penguin Group), 2012, winner of a Coretta Scott King Honor and the Jane Addams Peace Award

This atypical story about unkindness at school centers on the bully and not the bullied.

Read this book because the narrator’s journey from complicit cruelty to regret at missed opportunities will open the eyes and hearts of children, allowing them to examine their own treatment of peers critically, and yet with compassion.

Writers will enjoy the way every word counts, builds and repeats, creating a vortex around the lonely eye of the storm, where the new girl waits to be loved.

Artists will savor E. B. White’s watercolor palette of light and the way he uses expression and perspective to reveal the tensions and center of the story. From the new girl’s downcast eyes or hopeful smile, to a classmate’s sneer or the main character’s scowl, children’s faces draw a painful story to our attention and into our hearts.

Add this book to your collection because we live in a time where each kindness matters.

More books by Jacqueline Woodson:

 

• Coming on Home Soon, illustrated by E. B. Lewis
• This is the Rope, illustrated by James Ransome
• Visiting Day, illustrated by James Ransome
• Another Brooklyn
• Brown Girl Dreaming
• Hush

More books illustrated by E. B. Lewis:

• Coming on Home Soon, by Jacqueline Woodson
• D is for Drinking Gourd, by Nancy I. Sanders
• Circle Unbroken, by Margot Theis Raven
• I Love My Hair, by Natasha Tarpley

“Every little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world.”