Sibylle Delacroix’s Tears is an ode to tears. Big tears, little tears, loud, salty, slippery, tragic tears. With a simple palette overlayed on beautifully dusty pencil sketches, Delacroix lauds crying in all its forms for all its reasons. Tears help clear our heads and clean our emotions.

The short text complements the stunning illustrative style, presenting an accessible story that gives kids the opportunity to explore their emotions and how to express them.

Crying is a universal emotion response that shows what you are feeling. Some tears taste salty and others make your eyes red and puffy. Tears cultivate a special garden within you and help you to grow.

This wonderful book validates crying and erases the shame of doing so. It highlights scenarios where emotions evoke a waterfall that flows from your eyes and tumbles down your cheeks. Some tears fall gently and slowly while others gush like a tsunami accentuating acute feelings of anger and frustration. Crying washes your inside feelings out into the open and liquidly accentuates how you feel. Tears certainly can be an important part of the healing process.

The illustrations are extremely well done and kid-friendly, ones that kids can relate to I'm sure. This would be a lovely addition to a classroom or school library and is a perfect catalyst to spark a conversation about when and why we cry. I highly recommend this book.

As a teacher, working in a behavioral setting, I find that this book will be an amazing addition to my classroom library. I wish I had this book last year. A previous student lost her mother to cancer and did not know how to feel. Every time she fell, her tears would be loud and heavy as thought that was the only appropriate time to cry. I love this book because it will help little ones like her know it is okay to cry. I am appreciative of this lovely lesson in emotions and look forward to purchasing a copy for my classroom when it publishes.

I love this book so much. It shows all the different ways we cry, from soft tears to hard angry tears. It shows there is no shame in crying and that it is our body's reaction to our feelings. Finding a warm hug can help the tears stop and get you ready for new adventures. The illustrations are are beautiful. Sketches of children's sad faces with soft blue tears. When tears dry up the child rus through a colorful garden. As a child I would cry out of frustration and this book helps explain that is is ok.

With moody illustrations, this book teaches children that all people cry and for many reasons. It normalizes feeling all the feelings. It highlights that a good cry can be cleansing.

This was a beautiful small book about big feelings. The illustrations were simple but beautiful, and the message was as well. This would be a great book to help young children learn about emotions.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I think Tears would be a great book to read with young children to normalize crying and talking about your feelings. It could also be used in SEL (social emotional learning) units in schools.

I'm not a fan of the cover, but most of the inside illustrations were great. I liked the addition of warmer colors after the child was being comforted. I also adore the little crocodile!!

The text was concise and easy to understand.

Overall, I'd recommend this book to be used as a discussion starter with kids. 4.5 stars.

This book belongs in preschool classrooms, libraries, and children's bedrooms. I share another reviewer's wish that some diversity had been shown in the illustrations, and I'll talk about that when I use the book with families. But the book's clear messages-- that tears are valuable, that the feelings behind them deserve to be heard, and loving arms can help when it feels like tears will overwhelm-- are so important for everyone to understand.

There are a few places where the author's use of metaphor (tears watering a precious garden and a child's room being flooded by tears) will probably need to be explained. But the gentle illustrations lend themselves to that sort of wonder-filled conversation between loving adult and child. The book will feel like a respectful, wanted hug to young children who've been told to settle down and stop crying.

#Tears #NetGalley

Tears will become a staple on preschool shelves. The normalization of crying and sadness is perfect for a lap-read or teaching emotions at school or in storytimes. The use of teardrops throughout the text add to the emotion drawn on the page. This book would also have been great as a wordless picture book.

My only critique is that the family presented as white. With so many white-centric picture books with universal themes, it would have been helpful to have this book display more diversity.

That being said, I do think this is an important topic that gets right to the heart of relevant issues of sadness, depression, and mental health. I will be recommending this one a lot.