This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from Around the World
by Matt Lamothe; illus. by the author
Primary    Chronicle    48 pp.
5/17    978-1-4521-5018-5    $17.99

“This is me,” announces the opening spread, while seven children, ages seven to eleven, smile out at the viewer and introduce themselves with their names and nicknames. Successive spreads show panels of each child’s home, family, school attire, breakfast, school transport, teacher, classroom, handwriting, lunch, playtime, chores, dinner, evening, and bed. Finally, unpanelled and stretching across the double-page spread, a single shared image: “This is my night sky.” The countries represented are India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Peru, Russia, and Uganda; readers will enjoy making cultural comparisons (Romeo from Italy calls his teacher Luisa; India’s Ananya calls hers Aarti Bathla Ma’am) as they follow each child through his or her day. The neatly schematized organization plays nicely with the cozy digital illustrations, and there’s a judicious mix of panel placement and size in the clean design, with some topics covered in seven vignettes on one double-page spread and others spread across two. Appended family photographs demonstrate that these are all real portraits of real children; a glossary defines and expands unfamiliar terms; endpapers display a world topographical map with markers for each child’s location, in case you want to pay a visit.

From the July/August 2017 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

Save