BOOKS: The Quiet Book & The Loud Book

Congratulations to Jennifer Foster for winning this week's book giveaway!  While this contest is now closed, please come back to SixSeeds for more giveaways for good, family, fun!

At SixSeeds, we believe in the power of a good story.  The books our children are hearing and reading will move, inspire, and sometimes even shape their lives... even young lives. This week, we take a popular kids' book and examine it. Hopefully, the next time you're browsing though a crowded bookstore, our reviews will help you sort through the thousands of titles…  and you can choose wisely.

Title: The Quiet Book & The Loud Book

Author: Deborah Underwood

Illustrator: Renata Liwska 

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Books

Cost: $12.99

What parent doesn’t long for occasional silence? You know, the way things used to be, before squealing (yet delightful) kids entered the picture. In pursuit of temporary solace, we aren’t apt to contemplate the finer nuances of rare silence. As long as there are intact limbs and normal breathing, we are content just to be able to hear ourselves think. 

But author Deborah Underwood has brought new depths to the experience, differentiating between the “best friends don’t need to talk quiet” or “first snowfall quiet.” Underwood uses each page to point to a different quiet, as well as dive into a child’s oft reality of “trying not to hiccup quiet” or the “last one to get picked up from school quiet.”

So, it’s a creative book (yes!), and the kiddos will hone in on the skill of being quiet, right? Well, not exactly. In an interview with the author, Underwood presents her agenda in writing “The Quiet Book,”

“When I wrote the books, messages weren’t even on my radar. Writing with the purpose of teaching kids something can backfire and result in a preachy manuscript. But after Quiet came out, I realized it may have been informed by my interest in meditation, and by my concern about everyone being so overloaded with input these days. If The Quiet Book helps kids recognize and appreciate the various quiet moments in their lives, I’ll be thrilled.”

So, this isn’t a “how-to manual” or a sermon, but this little gem does offer us a lot of reasons to be quiet.

The Loud Book has recently been published as a sequel to the Quiet Book. While not quite as freshly innovative, it is still a natural and pleasant sequel. Using the same style of understated furry characters, Underwood distinguishes between “good crash loud” and “bad crash loud.” We can all relate to “dropping your lunch tray loud,” while fewer of us will be on the receiving end of the applause of “home run loud.”

The Bottom Line:

While there is no story line in either of these books, just a series of isolated pages conveying a different notion of quiet or loud, they show that even the simple notions of quiet and loud are not actually so … simple.

For Parents to Consider:

While The Quiet Book is not a guidebook in the art of creatively shushing our little ones, it introduces, the multi-faceted nature of silence. Some of it is good and some of it is bad, which brings us to an interesting point about what silence kids are used to. Children sometimes are quiet because they aren’t chatting, but never get to a truly (contentedly) quiet place in their soul. By presenting different types of quiet through examples that kids can grasp – it may help us to navigate these waters with them.

To Talk to Kids About:

This book led to a lively discussion with my 9 and 12 year old (who are older than the intended audience) about “Lego building quiet” versus “headache quiet.”

Or on a more serious note, use it to throw out other situations of silence or noise and how the silence or noise happened. Who needs to pay for therapy when a book like this will get you talking? My son, who doesn’t express a lot of emotion, was freely filling in the blanks…. and a few were actually serious. By hearing their first thoughts (“singing solo anxious,” “middle school anxious,” “It’s storming outside scared,” and “accidentally breaking vase scared”) – it was a good little walk into their world.

We are giving BOTH books away this week! Please leave a comment for a chance to win. We always love to hear from you.

On one week from publication at noon (EST), we'll pick a name in a random drawing from all eligible entries received and send you an email notification.  When you receive your package in the mail, you'll find out which book you received!

Limit one (1) entry per person; NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. Open only to legal residents of the 50 United States and Washington D.C. who are 18 or older as of date of entry.