More Diverse Than You Thought! [Review]

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Title: Diversity
Author: Jennifer Moore-Mallinos
Illustrator: Gustavo Mazali
Publisher: Puffin Books, An imprint of Penguin Random House
Type: Paperback
Pages: 96 pages
Recommended Age: 4 – 9 years (the publisher recommends this book for 6-9 years, but since the illustrations as so nice younger children will enjoy and appreciate too)

Do you have a kid who asks a million questions to you when s/he sees something different that is not familiar to her/him? Then this is just the right book for you. As the book states, it helps us celebrate not just our own individuality but also helps us recognize the many types of diversity around us, which include cultural, functional, geographical, linguistic, family, religion and gender. I did not know that we could be diverse in so many different ways!

What I like best about the book is, that it is not preachy in any way. It just shares snippets of life of different kids, animals, etc. and makes the reader ponder about his/her own life and think how similar or different it is. It’s a big picture book with 96 pages having around 45 snippets. You don’t need to read the book in sequence. You can just open any page of the book and start to read it. If your child has a specific query, you can directly go to the related page using the table of contents.

The illustrations are beautiful and help to explain the concept in a subtle manner. For instance, my child lives in a joint family set up with grandparents and mom-dad. So I wasn’t sure how to explain to him that there can be different types of families with either mom and dad or two dads or two moms or even a single parent. But he just saw this picture and asked me who are they. I told him “It is daddy, daddy and boy. Just like you have mumma and papa, this boy has papa and papa. No mumma.“ And he accepted it. He simply said, “The boy has two Papas”. It was so easy.

The book mentions the appropriate age group as 6 to 9 years but I think it can be shown to younger kids as well. My child is 4 years and he enjoyed some of the snippets I shared with him. Also, adults can learn from this book. I didn’t know that the human pyramids we make in India during “Dahi Handi” are a tradition in Catalonia too and are known as Castells!