All the Beating Hearts
by Julie Fogliano; illus. by Cátia Chien
Primary    Porter/Holiday    40 pp.
1/23    9780823452163    $18.99
e-book ed.  9780823455201    $11.99

“Each day starts with the sun.” Fogliano (My Best Friend, rev. 3/20) and Chien (The Bear and the Moon, rev. 11/20) use the cycle of a day as a frame for their meditation on existence. Fogliano’s prose is at once straightforward and poetic, talking about the routines that make up our days—eating, dressing, playing, whiling away time. Chien’s impressionistic pastel and colored-pencil illustrations have a soothing fluidity, but their vibrant colors and textures add a bracing note of contrast. A dream sequence in the middle of the book delves deeply (“and for a little while there / we are all just hearts / beating in the darkness / strong and steady and sure”), and the illustrations follow suit, losing form and taking on a more surreal cast for a few pages. While the text occasionally leans toward New Agey affirmations, Fogliano couches her words in everyday experiences children can understand and even acknowledges loss (“and some things / will die”). Chien’s illustrations have an inviting childlike quality in their use of color and in the images and backgrounds, preventing the whole from feeling too highfalutin. Similar in scope and tone to Scanlon and Frazee’s All the World (rev. 9/09), this book gives kids something to ponder.

From the January/February 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.