This title will surely appeal to those who remember their childhood reads with loving nostalgia. The inspiration is still there as a gift.

The quotes are organized into five sections. These include How to Be Good in the World (for example, kindness); How to Be Joyful in the World (for example, indulgence); How to Be Strong in the World (for example, fear); How to Be at Home in the World (for example, nature); and How to Believe in the World (for example, perseverance). Each short quote left me with something to think about. Note that throughout readers find illustrations as well.

Start with the introduction by R.J. Palacio and then the one by the compilers/editors, and next go where your imagination takes you. Readers will, I think, leave feeling better.

This book would make a most delightful gift.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for this title. All opinions are my own.

BELIEVE IN THE WORLD by Amy Gash and Elise Howard is a surprisingly small book (roughly 5 x 7 or the size of a large greeting card), but it packs a big punch. Touted as "an inspiring and delightful illustrated collection of quotations" and subtitled "“Wisdom for Grown-Ups from Children's Books," this work offers hours of enjoyment and reflection. The authors, an executive editor at Algonquin books and a literary agent, have done an excellent job of updating the earlier collection, What the Dormouse Said. Including "classic" references (e.g., Ramona Forever by Beverly Cleary) as well as more contemporary ones (e.g., All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven and I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai), the authors loosely group the quotes under five headings: How to be Good in the World, How to be Joyful, How to be Strong, How to be at Home, and How to Believe in the World. I love it, I love the quotes, and I love the mentions of favorite titles like Nancy Farmer's The Sea of Trolls, Mitali Perkins' You Bring the Distant Near, Christopher Paul Curtis' Bud, Not Buddy, or Julie Andrews Edwards' The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, to name a very few. I could go on and on. Put BELIEVE IN THE WORLD on your book shelf next to works like Matt Haig's The Comfort Book, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Gmorning, Gnight! and Charlie Mackesy's The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. Better yet – enjoy searching out and reading the many, many high quality and hopeful children's books referenced in BELIEVE IN THE WORLD. A new favorite quote: "This day will never, no matter how long you live, happen again. It is exquisitely singular." ~Naomi Shihab Nye

This book is beautiful. The quotes are well chosen and reading it is like a nostalgic hug from children's literature. This is a book to read a little at a time and reflect on the quotes being shared. This would be a wonderful book to keep on a coffee table or in a library for people to browse a little at a time.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was hoping this book would contain more text besides just the quotes, but it was full of great quotes.

What a great book! One every adult should read! So many great quotes that if people took to heart would lead to tremendous positive changes in our fearful world. It’s a book to read over and over again in order to absorb all the goodness within.

Thank you to Algonquin Books and NetGalley for the eGalley to review!

"Believe in the World" is a collection of quotes from children's books meant to uplift, inspire, and give us hope. It is a callback to quotation collections of the past, particularly "What the Doormouse Said" from 1999, and is full of things we need to tell ourselves when things get tough. It also has simple but lovely illustrations.

The book is broken up into five main parts, with each part starting off with a very brief introduction about what children's books do for us regarding that part's topic before being broken into smaller topical sections. We have:
- How to Be Good in the World (Kindness, Acceptance, Courage, Confidence, and Forgiveness)
- How to Be Joyful in the World (Delight; Books and Stories; Eat, Drink, and Be Merry; Indulgence; Adventure and Imagination; Sense and Nonsense; and Song and Dance)
- How to Be Strong in the World (Sorrow, Fear, Defiance, People are Complicated, and Individuality)
- How to Be at Home in the World (Family, Friendship, Community, Animals, and Nature)
- How to Believe in the World (Optimism; Love; Perseverance; Becoming Who You're Meant to Be; Choices; Change; and Faith, Hope, and Possibility).

While some quotes get repeated across sections and leans on many of the same authors, it takes quotes from a largely diverse range of children's books from all eras--classics to the recently published--and we get a nice index of the titles and authors in the back. It's great reference material! Unfortunately, not all of the quotes are from children's books, so it's a bit misleading.

If you're needing a bit of positive affirmation in your life, this is a nice book to pick up and read a different quote daily to get that mood boost and reminder that there is indeed good in the world. It's also a great source of wisdom to gift to others when they need just the right thing to hear.

In a Nutshell: A compilation of quotes from various books. Neat sections, relevant themes, but not exactly as the title promises. Still, a good option for those who find joy and inspiration in book quotes.

Children’s fiction (in which I include beginner reader books, middle-grade fiction, and some teen fiction) contains a lot of wisdom. It is not surprising then that the authors decided to compile quotes from children’s books. I love this intent, and to some extent, I like the implementation as well.

I was thrilled to see that the foreword is written by RJ Palacio. Her ‘Wonder’ is one of my all-time favourite books, and I have gifted it to all of my children’s friends. Not surprised to see how her write-up offers a beautiful ode to children’s fiction, highlighting how much wisdom they contain. I love how she says that children’s fiction has to be truthful, even when the truth is doled out with a spoonful of sugar.

Next comes an introduction by the two authors detailing how this book came into being. It seems that Algonquin Books had published a similar compilation of quotes in 1999, titled “What the Dormouse Said.” The authors decided that it was time to update and expand the collection and include some stand-out quotes from newer releases. Hence this new collection. I haven’t read the 1999 book, so I cannot comment on the exact changes made.

On the pro side, this new book is wonderfully and neatly structured. The content is divided into five meaningful sections with a heading that makes flipping to a particular section easy: ‘How to be Good in the World’, ‘How to be Joyful in the World’, and so on. Each section then has further subsections. For instance, the first one has five: Kindness, Acceptance, Courage, Confidence and Forgiveness. Each subsection contains at least ten quotes. Topic-wise browsing is thus a breeze.

The quotes come from a range of books. Classics and new titles written by authors from varied ethnic backgrounds ensure that this collection is diverse and inclusive. If you are an adult looking for middle-grade or YA titles to check out, this book has them in abundance.

There are some B&W illustrations scattered throughout the book, but not so many as to take away focus from the quotes. Some of the illustrations were great, others just okay.

The cover promises that the “wisdom” is only from children’s books, but I found many quotes taken from Young Adult books as well. A surprising entry was a quote from “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue”, which is an adult novel through and through. There are also quotes from adult classics such as “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the King.” So the tagline is a bit misleading.

All this would have been fine by me if the quotes were impressive. And many of them truly are. But the word “wisdom” in the tagline misled me into believing that every quote would actually have a wise message. But some of the quotes are funny, some are banal, and some are just absurd. Thus, the tagline is again misleading.

Moreover, a few quotes are repeated in multiple sections. Of course, you will notice this only if you read the book in a go, as I did. This is not the kind of book to read page-wise from start to end. It will work better when you flip to a random page and check out what special message awaits you there, or if you browse through the topics and go to the one that fits your emotional requirement.

I do believe with all my heart that there is tremendous wisdom in children’s fiction. While adult novels also contain deep thoughts, books meant for younger readers often write the truth in a simple and straightforward manner, which is very helpful when we want advice that gets straight to the point. This book compiles some of those brilliant quotes, but the heavy reliance on young adult books, the bland/hackneyed sound of some of the quotes, and the strange inclusion of some absurd quotes in a book supposed to have “wisdom’ made this a mixed bag for me.

Nevertheless, it is a beautiful collection as long as you disregard the tagline. So it will make a good gift option or a coffee table book to browse through at leisure.

3.5 stars.

My thanks to Algonquin Books for providing the DRC of “Believe In the World” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

I love three things about this book:

First, there were a few quotations that I recognized. Seeing them in this collection affirmed my high opinion of the books they came from.
Second, the quotations were either thought-provoking, inspiring or humorous. In any case, it made me want to read the books they came from.
Finally, the book is organized by theme. I want to use Believe in the World as a reference in my library. When teachers come in looking for a read aloud that will support a theme or topic, this is going to be a great resource for them.

I highly recommend this book for elementary and secondary librarys.

Thank you to NetGallley and Algonquin Books for providing an eARC of this book.

This book was not really what I was expecting! It's a lovely coffee-table type book for a gift, where you could flip it open and see some uplifting quotes. However, it is literally just that, a collection of quotes, with no original writing to tie it together except a very brief introduction. I think this really would have benefited from that.

This book collects quotes from a diverse range of classic and contemporary children's books, organizing the quotes by theme and highlighting the timeless wisdom available in the selected picture books, juvenile novels, and YA novels. This will appeal to people who are looking for a literary-inspired gift book with inspirational quotes, but I found it rather lacking. Some of the quotes are truly insightful, but others just read like generic inspirational quotes. They might be really meaningful or profound in their original context, but in the absence of story and character development, they don't have the same impact.

In addition to the literary quotes, this book includes some basic illustrations, but they just feel like filler. They don't add much to the book's appeal, and don't live up to the beautiful cover. There's just not much to make this book worth the purchase price. The introduction is fine, but it would be nice if there were some additional essays or reflections throughout the book about what quotes or childhood books are important to different people, or something like that. This would make the book more unique and worthwhile, and less replaceable by a Buzzfeed list of inspirational quotes. I don't think that the curation here is special enough to make this stand out, and there's not enough added material to go along with the quotes.

I also noticed multiple errors. A quote gets attributed to Lynda Mullaly Hunt that isn't original to her: "Everyone is smart in different ways. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking that it's stupid." Hunt rephrased the first sentence of the original quote, but the rest of it is verbatim. This anonymous quote commonly gets misattributed to Einstein, and now these editors are misattributing it to someone else! Hunt was referencing an established, familiar cultural concept in her novel "Fish in a Tree," and the editors should have presented the quote as something that inspired Hunt, not something that she created herself.

This book also includes a quote from "The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue," which is not a children's book. Not even CLOSE. It's not even mature YA. It's a straight-up adult novel, and has no business being quoted in a book about "wisdom for grown-ups from children's books." What were the editors thinking? This almost made me wonder if they were picking their own selections off poorly curated Internet lists, without even being familiar with all of the books in question.

There are also at least two quotes that are taken out of context to mean something other than the author intended. One is a classic quote from C.S. Lewis's "The Magician’s Nephew":

“Make your choice, adventurous Stranger,
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.”

This appears in the "courage" section, and I was aghast. In my head, I could hear Polly Plummer spluttering in wrath and indignation, because she was the one showing true courage, not Digory! He struck the bell and woke Jadis, since he didn't want to deal with his unsatisfied curiosity. Polly wanted to resist the temptation and walk away, which was a show of true strength.

That isn't the only egregious problem in the courage section, either. It also features this quote from "Matilda": "Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable." This is LITERALLY Matilda's assessment of why the horrifically abusive teachers at her school are able to get away with the way that they treat kids. Matilda observes that their actions are so over-the-top that adults would never believe a child's story about what goes on at school. This quote is... not life advice, guys.

Overall, I felt like this book was a slapped-together cash grab, with no enduring value or nothing to make it stand out over other collections of literary quotes, Buzzfeed lists, or the Goodreads quote database. This will still appeal to some people who are interested in decorative, literary-inspired gift books, but I wouldn't recommend it.

I loved Believe in the World. All my favorite quotes in a well designed book. This will be a great graduation gift or for someone going through something when they need an uplifting and life-affirming message to offer encouragement.

Believe in the World is a beautifully crafted tale of stories and illustrations that will delight children and adults alike. It gives the reader hope and something to believe in in an increasingly dark and dreary world.

A nice anthology of quotes from children's literature. I think it could have benefitted from some design tweaks and more original writing in the form of introductions or essays.

This is a lovely book, that you can flip through whenever you need to believe in the world again or be lifted up. This compilation is well put together and has illustrations throughout that go with some of the quotes from the books.
I will be flipping back to this from time to time. I liked revisiting favorite children's books through the quotes.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC.