Review Detail

Tug your Earlobe gives younger middle-grade readers insight into nonverbal body language. The sentences are descriptive, with basic illustrations to demonstrate, making them easy to follow. This could be an excellent resource for children who do not intuitively interpret nonverbal communication, as well as put a name to what is often natural for people to do. The illustrator has varying skin tones and male/female characters to demonstrate. However, I found some of the illustrations problematic where many of the nonverbal actions that could be interpreted as negative or submissive were rarely the white male character. The information is a good start and is likely culture-specific in the range of those who would benefit from reading this. Since this book is trying to attune us to nonverbal communication, the fact that the illustrations and a few of the sentences are problematic are more noticeable than they might otherwise be given another topic.