When children look for picture books to read, their standards tend to focus on the illustrations and the characters rather than the moral messages that are embedded in the story. So, it’s nice when a picture book can offer both. One such book is Becoming Beautiful by Tarang Rawat, a beautifully illustrated picture book that addresses body positivity issues for young girls. Check out my review of Becoming Beautiful below!
Becoming Beautiful book summary
Alena is celebrating her eighth birthday, and all of her friends come over to celebrate. The party guests are a diverse set of girls of different ethnicities, builds, and physical features. Each girl at the party remarks on a physical trait that they don’t like about themselves. Whether it’s their hair, complexion, or weight, there is no one girl who feels completely confident in herself. Even the birthday girl, Alena, feels that her nose is too big.
Overhearing their familiar conversation, Alena’s mother presents the girls with a magical gift that helps them to see their future. In each future, the traits that they worried about as kids are outgrown or embraced as more important personality traits contribute to their success and happiness. As a result, they are able to put aside what they consider their flaws. Then, they learn to love themselves the way they are.
A body positive message
A book about body positivity for girls is such an important topic to introduce to young readers. At first, I wondered if the characters were a little too young to be so conscious of their self-diagnosed flaws.
Then, I thought back to my childhood feelings of inferiority. I realized that my own insecurities began even before the age of eight. And those insecurities often didn’t have to be pointed out to me. I discovered them on my own.
The girls in Becoming Beautiful act age-appropriately to their insecurities, merely lamenting their frizzy hair, freckles, or height. They aren’t yet at the point of taking action to conceal or alter their appearance. This allows Alena’s mother to head them off using a supernatural tool to help fight those feelings.
Her resource is one that the reader won’t be able to access themselves. But it can offer hope and encouragement that it’s what you do with your life that counts, not how you look doing it.
The fact that Alena’s friends all look different to begin with helps to highlight the fact that not everyone can look the same. A trait that’s desirable to one girl may be undesirable to another. So, to chase perfection is futile because no one can agree on what perfection looks like. This is because perfection isn’t real. But uniqueness is. So, embracing your differences isn’t about giving in to them. It’s about putting a premium on being uniquely you rather than an unachievable image of a perfect you.
A rhythmic narration
Becoming Beautiful is written in a rhyming third person narration. Rhyme schemes always puts me on edge during a first read through of a book. It’s so easy to come off as choppy and limiting in word choice. However, Rawat pulls off this technique well. It doesn’t distract from the story or hold her back from being able to hit on all of her points.
The setting
One element that I found a bit unnecessary was that the story took place on Alena’s birthday. The event really does nothing to drive the plot except to bring Alena and her friends together. But that could have easily have been achieved in an after school hang out or sleep over. There, body positivity would come up more organically. The focus at a birthday party is typically more on the celebration.
However, the story jumps around outside of the birthday party. We see images of the girls in all of their glory juxtaposed with images of the girls’ insecurities. One page features the more popular girls at school who ridicule Alena and her friends. This taps into the bullying aspect of body positivity that is hard to combat. It’s hard to embrace the way you look when someone else tells you otherwise. Their insecurities can still be used against them. It takes a tremendous amount of confidence and bravery to fight against the building pressures of adolescence and make out on the other side with some self-esteem intact.
Strength in friendship
Luckily for Alena, she has a large group of friends who are all going through the same thing and have a safe space to voice their concerns with empathy and without judgement. Sharing feelings of inadequacy can feel more empowering than simply being told “you’re pretty” or “you’re not fat.” It shows that it’s normal to feel imperfect, and it encourages you to see beyond the external and more inward at the traits that your friends like about you, such as interests or skills, the way you gravitate toward them for their personality rather than the way they look.
Alena’s friend, Vanessa, is seen becoming a surgeon one day while Sofia becomes a champion runner. Meanwhile, Jessie sees an image of herself a dance with a boy who likes her inside and out, showing her that she doesn’t have to change externally in order for boys to like her. This relieves the reader of those feelings of self-doubt that make them want to change their appearance in order to be seen and admired by others.
The artwork
Becoming Beautiful is illustrated by Elena Napoli. Every page is filled with a busy, girly color palette which really draws in its target audience. The artwork definitely takes advantage of the birthday party backdrop, highlighting many of the pages with pastel banners, colorful balloons, and presents wrapped with an array of paper and bows.
The strongest element of the art is in the depiction of the characters. Napoli highlights the diversity of their physical traits and gives them postures and facial expressions to match their personalities. Each girl has her own way of exhibiting insecurity in the beginning pages which transform into comfortable, more animated postures by the end of the book. Even Alena’s mom is depicted in an eye-catching, energetic way and serves as a confident female role model for the girls.
My recommendation
In the end, no single book or voice can shield young girls from feeling unsatisfied with some part of their bodies. But Becoming Beautiful is a great stepping stone in helping to combat those feelings as well as outside voices that try to reinforce those insecurities. I recommend this book to all school-aged picture book readers, whether they have voiced insecurities of their physical appearance or not. It’s never too early to start what will become a lifelong struggle to feel comfortable in your own skin.
Buy it!
Buy a copy of Becoming Beautiful here, and help support local bookstores! This is an affiliate link, and I will earn a commission on any sales.
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This sounds like a beautiful book; I love that it is beautiful not only to look at but also beautiful to absorb and read. Thanks for sharing!