Hello, Beautiful by Traci N Todd & Loveis Wise

I adore Loveis Wise’s work, which moved me to tears in the astonishing What I Must Tell The World, a children’s biography of Lorraine Hansberry. I wasn’t quite as moved here, but their art is spectacular throughout, in a book about encouraging young children to feel their feelings and embrace their entire selves.

Hello, Beautiful depicts a mixed race child with their parents and Black grandmother. The adults form a close-knit unit who nurture and raise the baby together. Over the course of the book’s pages, said baby is exhorted to be their own person no matter the highs and lows that life may throw at them. Inner strength is beauty, and honoring your feelings while also looking for the humanity in others is essential.

The text is written as a love letter from a caregiver to a young child, but also contains loads of advice for how to be truly beautiful. In a world where Black bodies are devalued based on skin color or other supposedly African features, this is a really important sentiment to relate. Black kids need to hear that they’re beautiful because they’re authentic and brave and eager to live in community, a message they’re not often afforded in the United States Of America.

And while I very much applaud that intent, something about the execution here just didn’t work for me. Maybe it’s the idea of beauty being the (simplistic) benchmark. Maybe it’s the idea that toddlers have the discernment to know when someone is worth listening to; to which this mother of three says lol. While I’m definitely on board with giving kids permission to follow their own hearts, and feel that society as a whole would be much healthier if people were better able to acknowledge and deal with their emotions, something about the way that negative feelings are handled in this book made me feel uncomfortable. Idk if it’s because my survival instinct kicked in hard against making a ruckus at every hurt, or if I’m just meh on the idea of raising complainers. While it’s good to protest injustice, it’s weird to get all Karen about everything, and this book does not make any attempt at differentiating the two.

I really liked the art tho, and think this would probably be a valuable book for a lot of parents. It just wasn’t for me.

Hello, Beautiful by Traci N Todd & Loveis Wise was published April 7 2026 by Viking Books For Young Readers and is available from all good booksellers, including