OUTSIDE MY WINDOW

A little girl describes the idyllic scene outside her window and wonders, “What’s outside your window?”

The book presents children gazing out their windows, waving from riverbanks, and peeking from gates in locales all over the world. Straightforward text complements the equally direct digital illustrations as the page turns reveal pops of color within a mainly pastel palette. Life for children across the globe is expressed simply by their descriptions of what’s right outside their windows in their immediate environments. While this concept is lovely, it also simplifies nuanced experiences of children living in diverse settings. The book ends as the young brown-skinned girl who started the book with her question wonders at the bigness of the world, which becomes a little smaller, a little more interconnected when she looks “up at the moon we share.” It’s a sweet ending that would be inspiring if the conflation of vastly different experiences by emphasizing the sameness of a shared celestial body wasn’t such a tired trope. The existence of racially diverse characters and the inclusion of a list of the locations noted in the book don’t accomplish the author’s stated goal of enabling readers to understand that “looking out someone’s window—like ‘walking in someone’s shoes’—helps us understand a person’s life and circumstances.”

A shallow, worn exploration of diverse experiences.