Review Detail

From author Peter H. Reynolds, WHEN YOU DREAM BIG follows young Charley during Dream Big Week at school. Her teacher has students write down their dreams on wings they’ve created and share them with the class. But Charley doesn’t know what she wants to be when she gets older.

I love the message of this book. Charley is very unsure of what she wants to do when she gets older and she feels nervous during class when everyone is sharing their dreams. But that night Charley has a dream that she can remember, one about what she wants to be when she gets older. And it isn’t a specific type of job, it’s about the person that she wants to be. This is a message that is present in kid’s media, but that can never be stated enough. You don’t need to know a specific job or place, you can just know what type of person you want to grow up to be.

The book also has a really important and impactful grounding moment. Overwhelmed and nervous, Charley is walking back from school. She has to ground herself, focusing on her feet and wiggling her toes. Grounding can be difficult for children; they aren’t always taught proper ways to feel anchored into the world. Including something like this in the book shows kids one way that they can ground themselves.

This book is full of colorful images, bright shining colors that don’t always take up the entire page. The whitespace around the images allows there to be a focal point, a main area or image to focus on instead of getting lost in background details. The colors are bright and bubbly, bringing a sense of life to the story. The colors also shift with Charley’s mood, becoming grayer and bluer when she gets anxious.

Beautiful images accompany this story and make WHEN YOU DREAM BIG is a wonderful tale. Charley’s experience with being unsure about what she wants to be brings to light a different way of defining “dreams”. Not just what you want to be, but rather who you want to be.