Humble and Kind: A Children's Picture Book

by Lori McKenna, Katherine Blackmore (Illustrator)

Overview

Award-winning songwriter Lori McKenna’s iconic song—as popularized by Tim McGraw—is the perfect basis for a picture book that celebrates family and togetherness.

One of Kirkus Reviews' 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2021

“Children will feel reassured by the sentiments within this expressive extension of the music, and a sweet daydream of a picture book. ” —School Library Journal

"Hold the door, say please, say thank you

Don’t steal, don’t cheat, and don’t lie

I know you got mountains to climb but

Always stay humble and kind . . ."

Humble and Kind is a picture book based on Lori McKenna’s song, popularized by Tim McGraw. McKenna later recorded the song on her ninth studio album, The Bird and the Rifle.

Lovingly illustrated by Katherine Blackmore, this gentle picture book tells the story of a family who is striving to remain humble and kind. We follow the family through their daily lives as they find different ways to lend a hand to each other and to their broader community. Full of touching scenes of familial relationships, Humble and Kind will teach adults and children alike the power of family while introducing them to this beautiful song.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617758522
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	03/02/2021
Series:	LyricPop
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	378,236
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	3 Months to 7 Years

About the Author

Home and the people who make it have captivated LORI McKENNA for years. Over the last three decades, as she became a wife and mother of five, she has also emerged as one of the most respected, prolific singer-songwriters in popular music. Her 2016 release The Bird and the Rifle netted three GRAMMY nominations, along with Americana Music Association nods—all firsts for McKenna as an artist. Then, she made history: in 2016, she became the first woman ever to win the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year two years in a row thanks to cowriting Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush” and penning the number one hit song “Humble and Kind.” Both songs also clinched back-to-back GRAMMY awards for Best Country Song. In 2017, she became the Academy of Country Music’s first female Songwriter of the Year. The Tree, her much-anticipated eleventh studio album, was released on July 20, 2018, on CN Records via Thirty Tigers. Produced by Dave Cobb, The Tree, a 2019 Americana Awards Album of the Year nominee, takes one of McKenna’s signature themes—family—and builds a tapestry of experiences she has lived and overheard, been told and dreamed up, to create a stunning ode to life’s defining relationships.

KATHERINE BLACKMORE is an artist who grew up in a loving family of makers. Her professional career spans over twenty-five years of illustrating, animating, and teaching. Blackmore’s work has been featured in products for American Greetings, animated films for Disney, and several children’s picture books. She currently teaches kids in the Creative Core Art Program, which she founded. One of eleven children, her experience inspires her artwork as she seeks to convey the sublime moments of her joyful childhood. She lives in Orlando with her husband, Eric, and enjoys being “Auntie Kathy” to sixty nieces and nephews. Humble and Kind is her latest children’s book.

Editorial Reviews

"All of these entertaining books introduce children to the energy and power of a story well told and its ability to capture the imagination, helping us see ourselves more clearly as we are and as we aspire to be."

Henry Carrigan’s “The Reading RoomR No Depression

"Children will feel reassured by the sentiments within this expressive extension of the music, and a sweet daydream of a picture book."
—School Library Journal

"A harmonious outing."
—Kirkus Reviews, one of the 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2021

"Now Humble and Kind comes to picture-book readers with illustrations by Katherine Blackmore as part of [the] LyricPop series. In its pages, an interracial family with a Black father and a White mother enjoys bucolic summer days, building a treehouse when it’s sunny, making a blanket fort when it rains, and always loving one another."
—Kirkus Reviews, One of 10 Picture Books to Look For in 2021

Included in Publishers Weekly's Spring 2021 Children's Sneak Previews

From the Publisher

05/01/2021

PreS-K—Into the recent trend of picture books based on pop songs—from folklore to rock—comes this entry, with soft focus illustrations and charming scenes of a biracial family of five working around the home, gathering, shopping, building a treehouse, and more. The lyrics of McKenna's song—"You know there's a light that glows by the front door"—wrap and frame these scenes like photos from an album; the father has light brown skin, the mother tan, and their children share similar facial features and skin tones. But it's not their looks that make them a family; it's the casual way they are posed, with a baby up on the father's shoulder, the brother pushing a wagon, their postures leaning in to one another, and a spirit of love and cooperation in every scene. There isn't a narrative arc, in text or in pictures, but the atmosphere is snug, and for fans of the song, which reflects the tenets of many world religions and mentions a church is otherwise secular. VERDICT Children will feel reassured by the sentiments within this expressive extension of the music, and a sweet daydream of a picture book.—Kimberly Olson Fakih, School Library Journal

School Library Journal

2020-12-25
The lyrics of the multiaward-winning country song become captions to describe acts and moments in the lives of a loving biracial family.

Blackmore visually elaborates on cues and values in McKenna’s unchanged verses to create a loosely connected storyline in which three biracial children, with their White mother and Black father, attend church (“ ’cause your momma says to”), visit their grandpa (who is Black), share a root beer Popsicle, and wave American flags as a small-town parade goes by, among other activities. In line with the chorus—“Always stay humble and kind”—they treat their neighbors and particularly one another with (usually) unforced courtesy and respect. The line “Know the difference between sleepin’ with someone, / and sleepin’ with someone you love” is rendered innocuous with a picture of the parents snoozing in a hammock as their children hang out contentedly below. Some of the lyrics are likewise stretched, though to benign purpose, in the co-published (Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay, written by Otis Redding and Steve Cropper, illustrated with stylized, geometric San Francisco scenes by Kaitlyn Shea O’Connor, and featuring here a solitary cat whose hunger and loneliness both end when a young Black child arrives with a fish and companionably stays to watch “the tide roll away, ooh yeah.” Music is not supplied, but spoken or sung, the words in both outings make better fits with the pictures than in most pop-song crossovers.

A harmonious outing. (Picture book. 6-9)

Kirkus Reviews