Loving Kindness

This soothingly reiterative picture book emphasizes an individual’s innate worth, employing a simple refrain encompassing everyone’s ability for love, the validity and importance of making mistakes, and basic actions such as dreaming, breathing air, feeling sun, and overall connection to the earth. Underwood replaces the subject of each simple sentence with “you,” “she,” “they,” and “everyone” in turn: “Everyone is a blessing./ Everyone is beautiful just as they are./ Everyone is loved, and everyone loves.// Everyone makes mistakes,/ and it’s okay to make mistakes,/ because that’s how we learn.” Hopgood’s bold, multilayered artwork, rendered in mixed media, emulates stamps amid concentrated splashes of color, with dot-eyed, brown-skinned humans of varying ages and smiling animals against surreal natural landscapes. An affirmative read-aloud ideal for the youngest readers. Ages 4–8. (Nov.)