Dream Big by Joyce Wan

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Dream Big by Joyce Wan
Review Copy from Scholastic Books
I have mixed feelings about board books for toddlers about famous figures. These concept books often reduce complex figures to one or two words and a single image in order to make them accessible to their intended audience. Dream Big does exactly this, yet somehow I keep returning to it. You can't be what you can't see, and Dream Big, which features a diverse representation of women who have made important contributions to our world, does a marvelous job showing little readers the many things they can grow up to achieve. That said, it is highly recommended that adults reading this book to little listeners take a few minutes to pore over the back matter that lists each women and what she is known for so that, when the words and images don't make it totally obvious, they can fill in the blanks. The first page of Dream Big is a great example of this where the words, "Dream Big" accompany a woman with a pencil tucked behind her ear gazing up at a beautiful building. She is Zaha Hadid, world-renowned Iraqi architect known for her "bold, visionary designs."

Other great women featured in Dream Big are: Amelia Earhart, Harriet Tubman, Valentina Tereshkova, Maya Angelou, Jane Goodall, Florence Griffith Joyner, Eugenie Clark, Frida Kahlo, Ellen Degeneres, Junko Tabei (seen on the cover), Rosa Parks, Katherine Johnson, Chien-Shiung Wu, and Sirimavo Bandarnaike.

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