playful in it’s approach to handling emotion and racially diverse! sometimes it felt like it was more targeted towards parents than the children themselves though, with “bigger” words such as sensory being used.

"The Mindful Magician and the Trip to Feelings Town: tips and tricks to help the youngest readers regulate their emotions and senses" is an exciting, vibrant interactive book by Lauren Brukner, inspired by the strength children showed during the pandemic, that focuses on strong emotions and how to identify and process them accordingly.

Addressing the reader directly, The Mindful Magician takes us on a journey through Feelings Town, stopping to help children who are overwhelmed by their emotions along the way. It simplifies these emotions, making them easy for children to understand, with fun names like "fidgety feelings" or "inside body feelings." Encouraging readers to take part in silly actions while identifying emotions and the causes for them, this book maintains a light-hearted, fun feel the whole way through.

Brightly coloured, expressive illustrations by Jennifer Jamieson bring this book to life. Her crowded, energetic, full page illustrations show the chaos of overwhelming feelings, contrasted with simpler, tranquil illustrations to show peace once they have been dealt with. Each emotion in the book has been assigned a colour and all illustrations regarding that emotion clearly correspond, so the book makes sense visually. With such an incredible visual element, children will savour this book!

Touching upon more complex feelings than just happiness and sadness, this book addresses sensory overload and "inside" feelings like needing to go to the toilet. It encourages children to help their peers address their emotions, and shows there is no shame or embarrassment in feeling overwhelmed. It should be made clear this isn't a self help book. While it will help children understand it's normal to experience a range of emotions, it doesn't contain any "true" ways to deal with these past finger wiggling and toe touching. However, this engaging, interactive book can be a great way for adults to go further into ways of dealing with emotions with their children.

Ultimately, The Mindful Magician and the Trip to Feelings Town is a wonderful, absorbing book that will have children wanting to read and wriggle over and over again. Featuring a lovely message for all children: "You are full of magic."

Lauren Brukner has done a great job not only explaining many different feelings that everyone experiences but also gives practical ways to deal with those feelings. This book is practical, entertaining and fun. What an excellent book! Thanks #NetGalley

This is such a great way to introduce children to the various feelings they have. I think it was super cute to show feelings in such a fun and magical way. I think this would help kids understand their own feelings more. Also the graphics are so cute

I like that it had a disclaimer for adults explaining the topics included.

“All kids are magicians…they have tons of magic inside of them…and the best thing about magic is that we can use it to help.”

I absolutely love the message that kids have magic inside them, and that they can use that magic to help themselves and others! I also appreciate how this story helps normalize many common “big feelings” struggles that most kids can relate to.

Sadly, the implementation of what kids were told to do to “zap away” these feelings were questionable to me.

This seems like a fun interactive book to read aloud for a classroom/library story time. There were definitely positive aspects to this story, but didn’t feel like the “tricks” given were realistically helpful for most kids. This reading/learning experience could be enhanced by the reader adding a few more “tricks” to deal with big feelings like taking some slow deep belly breaths etc.

Thanks to NetGalley and the Jessica Kingsley Publishers for this e-arc.

This book was wonderful. Not only did it describe feelings in a way that kids can understand, it also made it clear that these feelings are normal and how to deal with them in a positive way. This book would be very easy for kids to understand and relate to. I would definitely purchase this for my children.