THE SKIN YOU LIVE IN

An earnest but energetic tribute to diversity, done up with postmodern arrays of smiling, stylized, lozenge-headed children paired to a rollicking celebration of: “Your coffee and cream skin, / your warm cocoa dream skin . . . / Your chocolate chip, double dip sundae supreme skin! / Your marshmallow treat skin, / your spun sugar sweet skin . . . / your cherry topped, candy dropped, frosting complete skin.” Tyler also urges readers to think about the commonality of “The skin that you laugh in; / the skin that you cry in; / the skin that you look to / the sky and ask, ‘Why?’ in.” Though he changes his tone and plies a verbal mallet to drive his point home in the last several verses, the earlier wordplay more than compensates—while glimpses of one child in a wheelchair, and another held by a biracial couple, expand the general theme to encompass more than skin color alone. A sonically playful, if just a bit overlong, alternative to Sheila Hamanaka’s All the Colors of the Earth (1994). (Picture book. 6-9)