4 out of 4 stars
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It's hard to see a loved one suffer, but it's especially difficult when that pain comes from something as serious as cancer. When Juju goes to meet up with his friends, they notice that he looks a bit down and his little brother and sister aren't with him. They're relieved when they realize that Auggie and Izzy are okay, but crushed when they find out the frown on Juju's face is due to his mom having breast cancer. Worse yet, Juju feels responsible for it!
No Playing Frisbee Today by Tanja Huston is a children's picture book about the feelings one might have about a loved one being diagnosed with cancer. Jewels, one of Juju's friends, says that her aunt had cancer and is able to tell him a bit about what to expect, such as how Juju's mom will lose her hair from the medicine she'll take."It's all my fault. Mommy asked me to help around the house and I told her I didn't want to!"
I really liked this innocent overview of the battle with cancer. Tanja sticks to words that children will understand, and in fact "medicine" is probably the most scientific, complex word in the book aside from the phrase "breast cancer". The author manages to keep things calm and not make cancer sound scary; it's something that his mom will have to face head on and defeat, but then she'll be fine.
As this is a picture book, a good deal of the enjoyment comes from the art itself. The cover of the book is a perfect representation of what's inside, and it gave me a lovely newspaper comic strip vibe. The backgrounds aren't the most detailed, but the characters are cute enough and you can certainly feel their joy and sadness! At the time of this review the book is only available in hardcover, and the 8"x8" book has very solid covers and easy to read pages. In fact, not only are the images easy to see at a distance, so is the text. The text is always set on the left page and the single full-page image on the right, so there's no worry about text vs. background color issues.
In fact, throughout the entire book I found only one negative thing to mention: there was a single grammatical error early in the story. One of the children, when asking where Juju's brother and sister are, asks "Where is Auggie and Izzy?" While this is typically how people speak (especially when shortening it to merely "where's"), this may be misleading about how the sentence should actually flow, especially in a children's book.
With the way cancer is seemingly becoming more and more rampant as the years go on, No Playing Frisbee Today will likely be a rather timely book for many children. It's a great way to show children that it's not necessarily fatal (death isn't even mentioned in the book!) and that it's certainly not any child's fault. Guilt is a terrible thing and children have a way of feeling it even when it's the furthest thing from the truth, so it's nice that Tanja went out of the way in this book to clarify that it isn't Juju's fault. Tanja herself is a cancer survivor and mother, so she likely needed to reassure her own children of this fact. It's an easy recommendation for any young children who need to be introduced to cancer, whether it's a child with cancer themself, a relative, friend, or anyone that's caused them to be curious. My rating of the book is 4 out of 4 stars; the single error I found is nowhere near enough to mark a point off.
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No Playing Frisbee Today
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