Chad Sell

I picked this up for my 9 year old thinking it was just a cute book about kids playing pretend. But when I heard her talk to her grandma about parents fighting, I had to give it a look. And what I found was amazing.

Kids need a language to be able to express their feelings, and I love that Cardboard Kingdom gives them that. There are so many talking points in this. There are so many things in here for kids to see and connect to their own lives. I cannot rave about this enough.

There were two show more stories I barely made it through without crying. “The Gargoyle” was by far one of the most heart breaking stories I’ve ever read, and I finished it with tears in my eyes. The story about the robot also brought tears because I can see my loved ones in it. show less

Almost saccharine at times, but I still enjoyed it. The way that the book is broken into a sequence of stories (too self-contained to be called chapters) was a good choice, and despite there being a huge number of both familiar and new characters to track, things never became too confusing. The book was light, even though it touched on some fairly sensitive topics (one boy's mother struggling to support him and herself as a single mother, two different kids uncertain about showing members of show more their families who they really are out of fear of being judged, and one girl whose grandfather seems to be entering the early stages of dementia). The larger theme, about being welcoming to outsiders, was presented without being too preachy, and the illustrations themselves, as usual for the series, were brilliantly done. A solid book for the collection. show less

I spend more time than I should thinking about which, if any, of the books I read to my kids should "count" toward my reading goals for the year. (Sad to think that in a few years my daughters will be too old for this to be an issue, but that's not to be worried about here.) But this one was an easy "in". My 8yo and I have spent hours with this book and the one that came before it, reading them both multiple times over countless nights. And over that time I somehow managed to come up with show more fairly distinct voices for almost all of the characters in a cast that numbers in the double digits. (And that humblest of brags might be the whole point of this review.)
These books are such a fun read, with vibrant art and great stories that have a lot going on. I really feel like these are 12 (or so) different kids with 12 distinct personalities. They have interpersonal relationships with each other and their families, and the stories unfold from that. It's just really well done. And it captures that feeling of playing with a group of kids and how that can be a fun game but also become high stakes drama at the same time. show less

OH. MY. GOD. This is so adorable! And, yet, it wound up being so much more than I expected! Cute kids make cute doodles that come to life and leave the page to get into mischief, but that's just the surface; there are deeper lessons about accepting negative feelings as something to work through rather than to ignore or "kill," along with subtext about "feeding" the bad feelings, etc. Lots of diverse representation in various ways: the characters are different races and genders, and one of show more the kids draws "butterfly boyfriends" who rule warring kingdoms but go on romantic vacations together. The author, a gay man, wrote The Cardboard Kingdom, which was also nicely nuanced and had amazing representation, so I'm not surprised. show less