Lovely

By Jess Hong

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Big, small, curly, straight, loud, quiet, smooth, wrinkly.
Lovely explores a world of differences that all add up to the same thing: we are all lovely!

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“How nice to see a lovely book that shows the lovely in all of us.”
— Jennifer Fosberry, New York Times best-selling author of My Name Is Not Isabella

“A beautiful celebration of diversity!”
— Julie Downing, award-winning author/illustrator

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“Lovely, a debut picture book written and illustrated by Jess Hong, is a lively ode to being different. “What is lovely?” the text asks. “Lovely is different.” A girl with one blue eye and one brown eye looks directly at the viewer. Then comes a series of illustrative plays on words. The word “Black” is next to a white woman wearing black clothes. On the facing page, the word “white” accompanies a black woman with white hair. On other spreads, we see a tall woman walking a short dog (“tall”) opposite a short man walking with a tall dog (“short”), and a red-haired girl with a “fluffy” cat opposite a straight-haired girl with a “sleek” snake. As with any successful picture book, the art in Lovely doesn’t just illustrate the text, it expands it. This is why a spread like “Fancy. Sporty. Graceful. Stompy” works so well: Illustrated with four sets of legs — hairy legs wearing fancy red stilettos, prosthetic legs playing soccer, black legs in pink ballet slippers, and fishnet-stockinged legs in punk-rock platform boots — it shows the multifarious world in all its glory.

— R.J. Palacio, author of Wonder, for The New York Time's Book Review