This joyous book isn’t just about bellies, but about the diversity of our physical forms and a reminder to love ourselves and our bodies. Using an alphabet structure and bouncy rhymes, author Rennie Dyball’s body-positive text tells us that shape, size, and shade don’t matter, but eating healthy food, getting physical exercise and rest, being kind to ourselves, and listening to our bodies’ needs do. We’re reminded that saying things like “Too skinny” and “Too fat” can hurt people, that we’re all equal despite physical differences, and that all bodies have worth.
Illustrator Mia Saine’s images reinforce the message, showing a diversity of bodies: tall, short, fat, and skinny, and ones of different ages and abilities.
There’s queerness aplenty here, too. On the “C is for change” page, we see the same person at four different stages of life, from young child to elder. They start with long hair, dyed blue, which evolves into an asymmetric cut, short on one side and wavy across the top, and finally a short cut all around. It feels like the person is transitioning as nonbinary or trans or both; I’m tagging the book as having a nonbinary character since Saine is nonbinary and it makes sense that they’d represent their own identity, but there’s room for individual interpretation here. (In theory, it could be someone of another identity simply getting shorter haircuts, but the asymmetric cut screams “queer” to me, so I’m assuming it’s meant to be a queer person of some identity.) The key message is that “Years change your appearance, but you’ll always be you.”
Moving on, we come to:
G is for gender
a big part of you.
Express yourself
in a way that feels true.
And the page for “I is for inside” shows a person within the outline of a heart, surrounded by rainbow hues, as we read that beauty is inside. Other pages show girls with their arms around other girls, and boys with their arms around boys; they aren’t necessarily queer, but could easily be.
There are several other great books for young kids about bodies, including Bodies Are Cool, The Bare Naked Book, and Your Whole Body. The others are all a little more systematic in naming and exploring different body parts, while also celebrating their diversity; B Is for Bellies, in contrast, focuses more on feelings about our bodies and the need to care for our bodies in healthy ways, while also celebrating body diversity. There’s overlap among them all, and I recommend them all, but I encourage you to read my reviews to learn more about the differences among them. (Or just get them all for your home or library collection!)
