Boss is an educator widely recognized for her groundbreaking research on what is now known as the theory of ambiguous loss. Pauline Boss is professor emeritus Family Social Science at University of Minnesota. In reading this book I can answer yes to all of those questions.

Does the story contribute to the child’s intellectual, social, or emotional needs?.Is the style of the text and art appropriate to the topic of death and/or grief?.Are the characters well delineated? Is the setting accurate?.Is the content accurate and well organized?.

Does the text present a coherent concept of grief and/or death?.

I ask evaluators to consider if the content is age relevant. Kirkus Reviews named it Best Picture Books of 2019 About Small People in a Big Worlds. I submit the words of Kao Kalia Yang and the pictures by Seo Kim meet that criteria. There must be literary value and artistic merit. My own research in grief and picture books, an examination of death and grief in ninety-two picture books for young children, pre-school/early elementary, considering the content with regards to child development producing a rubric for evaluation brought me to these evaluative conclusions. All in developmentally relevant lyrical language interwoven with mixed media illustrations depicting the seasons, the protagonist’s point-of-view, and at time drawing back cinematically to display the “big picture” of family and community.

It is the story of family and of time passing and of babies being born and of an elderly neighbor passing away. They are a Hmong family and we observe culturally specific objects and practices such as the hanging of a story cloth on the living room wall. It begins as a little more than typical moving story of a young girl and her family moving to a new house. If I had to choose one picture book that resonated with me for most of the year it would be Kao Kalia Yang‘s A Map Into the World illustrated by Seo Kim.

A Map Into the World by Kao Kalia Yang