This Child, Every Child

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 7 MAR 2011

This CitizenKid title from the creators of If the World Were a Village takes a global look at the lives of contemporary children. Balancing statistics with fictional profiles of kids, Smith's concise narrative focuses on such topics as families, homes, health, work, war, and play. Each spread contains accessible summaries of articles from 1989's United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, underscoring the disparity between many children's lives and that document's vision and goals. This is not an easy book: Smith shares sobering figures, including that there are more than 100 million homeless children in the world, nearly 220 million between the ages of five and 17 work full-time, and 300,000 children belong to rebel armies. Such hard-hitting data should encourage readers to consider several questions and suggestions for taking action included in back matter. Rendered in acrylics with digital textures, Armstrong's gauzy paintings sometimes span multiple cultures in a single illustration (a kicked soccer ball bridges games in Australia and Indonesia), reinforcing the universal nature of children's needs. Ages 8 12.