ALL BODIES ARE GOOD BODIES

Told in rhyme, this book celebrates body parts such as hands, eyes, and noses.

“I love hands. Hands that are white and hands that are brown. / Freckles mean sunshine has sent kisses down,” begins this simple story of body acceptance. Barkla’s well-meaning effort describes a range of body parts and offers examples of how they might appear. Children with a variety of skin tones, hair textures, facial expressions, and racial presentations fill alternating pages. Though an effort is made to uplift marginalized attributes, the messaging is shallow and keeps conventional characteristics squarely in the center. Illustrator Salcedo’s art places a White-presenting child with mostly normative features as the protagonist, with non-normative bodies coming across as an afterthought. For example, in the spread celebrating “giant legs, tiny legs, hairy or smooth,” Barkla writes that “some legs are really quick, others don’t move.” An accompanying image shows a yoga-posing child wearing a prosthetic leg; as the joints reveal, the leg is certainly in motion. Meanwhile, of the five other kids rendered in the spread, four are slender and pale-skinned; the child who uses a wheelchair elsewhere in the book is nowhere to be seen. Readers looking for an accessible, body-positive picture book will find Tyler Feder’s Bodies Are Cool (2021) to be an excellent choice. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

All bodies are absolutely good bodies; unfortunately, not all books on the subject are.