3 out of 4 stars
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Find Your Happy: A Kid’s Self Love Book, written by Patricia May and illustrated by Snezana Grncaroska, is a picture book full of exercises and tips to help a young audience find happiness. This book uses inward exercises to help children bring out their creativity, learn relaxation methods, and focus on self-love, all with an overarching theme of finding peace and happiness within. Find Your Happy is approximately thirty-two pages; each page includes a full-page illustration and, in most cases, a full page of overlapping text.
This book is essentially a self-help book for children. There is no story, rather this book includes fill-in the blank tasks and descriptions of activities children can perform on their own. With a focus on meditation, stress relief, self-love and exploring creativity, I was a bit confused about the target audience for this book. On the one hand, the bright, colorful pictures seem appropriate for young children, but the large number of words on each page and the topics discussed in the book seem far more appropriate for a pre-teen audience. Further, the children in the illustrations appear to be of adolescent age. After consulting the Amazon blurb, the author intended this book for children of all ages, but I would be hesitant to recommend this book for younger children because the majority of the ideas in the book, like stress, meditation, chakras, and yoga, are likely not yet relevant to their lives.
The full-page illustrations in this book are absolutely beautiful. The medium of the illustrations appears to be watercolor, which added to the earthy, calming tone of the book. Further, the colors are vivid and bright, adding a sense of joy to each page. Quite a few of the illustrations include depictions of children, and I was happy to see that the children portrayed in the illustrations are of all different nationalities. Overall, the illustrations help promote the themes of happiness, peace, tranquility and love that this book attempts to portray.
Unfortunately, this book contained a lot of basic grammatical errors. Improperly placed commas and apostrophes were found on multiple occasions. Moreover, the version I downloaded did not include a book cover. Although the content of this book is helpful, and the author does a great job of including many varied methods and techniques to promote happiness and appeal to all different types of children, the book could use some polishing.
Find Your Happy would be most beneficial to pre-teen children. Many of the exercises in the book will be fun and engaging for children of that age. Further, the concepts at the heart of the book are within their basic comprehension. Pre-teens facing stressful situations in life, whether they be related to school or friends or family, will gain a lot of insightful information about inspiring activities that will help them attain a better mind set. Additionally, the beautiful and inclusive illustrations alone will pique curiosity. If not for the grammatical errors and somewhat confusing message about the intended audience, I could have given this book a perfect rating. However, in its current state, I rate Find Your Happy 3 out of 4 stars.
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Find Your Happy
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