“Everybody cooks./Everybody eats. Everybody cleans./Everybody helps. We’re all in this together,” says this cheery board book about sharing and community. Each page or spread shows children and their adults joyously working to make their community better, but also benefiting from their collective efforts: cleaning up litter, sharing a treat, bringing a cup of tea to a new mother holding an infant, painting a mural, and listening, laughing, and playing together.
Queer representation isn’t the point here, but it is a welcome part of this multi-diverse neighborhood. In one scene, a woman in a pink wig, long dress, and crown reads a story to an engaged group of children, with a string of pride flags in the background—clearly intended to be a drag story hour. On the next page, the drag queen is helping collect books for a book drive. And on the page that states, “Everybody loves,” we see what appears to be a two-mom couple swinging a happy child between them.
Another nice bit of representation is that on the page about sharing, it is a child using forearm crutches who is sharing a popsicle with a non-disabled child. Too often, disabled people are only shown as the recipients of assistance; here, it is refreshingly the opposite.
Simple and bright, this is a recommended title for the very youngest readers.
