Independent Reading Level: 530L

Awards:Charlotte Zolotow Award, Coretta Scott King Honor Book

Independent Reading Level: 530L

Awards:Charlotte Zolotow Award, Coretta Scott King Honor Book

This book follows a girl named Chloe and her perspective when a new girl named Maya joins the class. The children are mean to Maya and leave her out of activities. They say mean things. Later, Maya and her family move away and Chloe regrets the way she treated Maya. This book could be amazing in any second or third-grade library. It could also make an impactful read-out-loud for an SEL discussion on kindness and treating others nicely.

Chloe, the main character, ignores and leaves out the new student in her school named Maya, but afterwards learns the importance of being kind from her teacher. However, Maya ends up moving away and Chloe never gets to make it up to her. This is a sad and beautiful children’s story about the consequences of being cruel to your fellow peers because even though you may realize later that the way you treated that person is wrong and regret it, you may never be able to make up for it, which is what Chloe learns in the end. This is a very good book to teach children that sometimes you won’t have the opportunity to apologize for your mistakes, so just be kind to people and try not to do something cruel that will cause you to regret it for a lifetime. ( )

We're reading Estes' [b:The Hundred Dresses|42369|The Hundred Dresses|Eleanor Estes|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1328875733s/42369.jpg|1000219] for book club in December, so this new picture book immediately struck me as similar. They're both stories about a new girl in school who is treated as an outcast because her clothes are shabby and she seems culturally different from the other kids. And (spoiler alert) in both books the poor bullied girl moves away before the mean girls can realize how terrible they've been and apologize.

I think what makes Each Kindness special is that it distills the essence of a very big subject in kid lit: bullying. The kids in Each Kindness are probably in 2nd or 3rd grade, so this story can speak to very young kids, which is great. It may only take a few minutes to read, but I think it could have a big impact. The central positive image in the book is the ripple effect of a stone dropped in water, which is likened to the effects of doing something kind. It's a great image. It has the same kind of resonance the phrase "pay it forward" had for awhile. It makes you feel like each nice thing you do really can make the world a better place.

It's also interesting how Woodson doesn't make her bully seem that terrible (Chloe's certainly not as bad as Peggy in THD). Because the reader sees things from the bully's POV, we can feel sympathetic for Chloe and sort of understand how she falls into bullying without really choosing it. The bullying depicted in the book is relatively mild, mostly involving ignoring and excluding Maya, never harassing or attacking her.

Of course, this book is message-y, but not forcefully so. When our main character, Chloe, realizes that she should've shown Maya kindness, it's a quiet revelation. And the book in the end is pretty sad. Chloe is stuck with her regrets and we don't know when she'll get another chance to show someone kindness. Like her predecessor Wanda Petronski, we never know what happens to Maya. ( )