This beautiful picture book is equally beautiful in it’s description of a difficult to explain emotion – Loneliness.

About the Book

“What is Loneliness?” is a poignant and beautifully illustrated children’s picture book that explores the complex emotion of loneliness in a way that is relatable and reassuring for young readers. Through thoughtful storytelling and captivating visuals, this book takes children on a journey to understand, embrace, and find ways to alleviate loneliness.

“What is Loneliness?” is not just a story; it’s a valuable tool for parents, caregivers, and educators to initiate conversations about emotions and mental well-being. The book provides a comforting and empowering message, assuring young readers that it’s okay to feel lonely at times and that there are ways to navigate and overcome those feelings.

This picture book is an essential addition to every child’s library, offering a reassuring and uplifting exploration of a universal emotion and the profound connections that can arise from understanding it.

My Thoughts

Unfortunately, we all experience loneliness, but as I’ve quickly learned with my daughter, there are so many emotions and experiences that can be so hard to explain. No one prepares you for trying to explain loneliness or racism or why people are mean, so each time I come across a kid’s picture book for these complex topics I’m excited that someone else has had that spark of inspiration of how to explain a hard topic to kids. Not all of them are good at it, but Rebecca Eisenberg has knocked it out of the park.

Alongside Kayla PHan’s gorgeous illustrations, Eisenberg has distilled this complex emotion into something even the youngest of kids will at least be able to begin to understand. Her simple words, with logical accompanying pictures, are fantastic for helping young children to understand. They’ll also help remind parents that loneliness isn’t a forever feeling, and it’s okay to have bad emotions. So many of us grew up in a time when we were encouraged to bottle, move on, and get over it. Helping heal those negative experiences, and bring positive ones to the next generation is such an important job, and I’m excited that we have all these great resources to help us do that!

I’m so grateful to the author, illustrator, and Love Books Tours for providing me (and my daughter!) with this lovely book review and enjoy. I look forward to more books from this author and illustrator, and more books about complex emotions to explore with my daughter.

Who’s It For?

This book is designed for ages three to seven, but I don’t think it’s ever to early to read to your child and never to early to read whatever you want to them. I think your babies and toddlers would easily benefit from hearing the content and they’d probably love looking at the pictures. They might not sit through the whole thing, but honestly, some days neither will my six year old. This would also be great for classrooms and homeschool programs as part of a socio-emotional learning curriculum.

Content Warnings: Discussion of Complex Emotions

About the Author

Rebecca Eisenberg, MS, CCC-SLP is a certified speech language pathologist, author, instructor and parent of two children. She has been practicing in the field of speech language pathology since 2001 and works with both children and adults with complex communication needs in a variety of settings. Rebecca graduated with her Masters in Science from Teachers College, Columbia University in 2001. She specializes in the field of augmentative and alternative communication and is currently on the tech team at WIHD in Valhalla, NY.

She has multiple games and a workbook published by Super Duper Publications. She is also co-author of a children’s book titled, The Monkey Balloon and the sequel, A Tale of The Monkey Balloon. Her picture book, My Second Year of Kindergarten was released April 4th, 2018. Her two most recent publications are titled All About Core and All About Feelings. These books were specifically published for children with complex communication needs that are working on building literacy and vocabulary skills.

Rebecca has always loved and treasured children’s books, specifically those that embed a meaningful lesson in the story. Her passion lies in finding those moments to connect with children through storytelling. Rebecca began her blog https://www.languageduringmealtime to create a resource for parents to help make mealtime an enriched learning experience with children’s literature. She also began her podcast Language During Mealtime to help educate both parents and educators on facilitating language during read alouds.

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