Our heroes How kids are making a difference

This book briefly profiles ten young activists from around the world. Their work is inspiring, but the book design is not: pages are crammed with text, photos of varying quality, stiffly rendered illustrations, and sidebars. Each page includes inspirational quotes from children and well-known adults (e.g., Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama). Lack of a table of contents or index is unfortunate. Websites. (c) Copyright 2015. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In this third offering about young activists, Wilson takes a look at true stories of children who are giving and helping worldwide. Twelve-year-old Adora Svitak sets the tone: "The world needs childish thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity, and especially optimism." The 10 children featured in this compilation, along with the many others mentioned, have an overabundance of all those characteristics. Kesz Valdez from the Philippines was only 7 when he first gave shoes to less-fortunate children; in 2012, he was awarded the International Children's Peace Prize. Hannah Taylor of Canada started the Ladybug Foundation to help the homeless. She paints jars and cans to look like ladybugs and sells them to raise money. Eleven-year-old Andrew Adansi-Bonnah of Ghana raised thousands of dollars during his school break for starving Somali children. He stenciled a slogan on a T-shirt and walked through his city collecting donations. Themes of bullying, class bias and others may overlap with those in Wilson's previous work (Our Rights: How Kids are Changing the World, 2013), but that doesn't make these stories any less inspirational. The swift portraits seize readers, leaving them not only wanting to know more, but to do more. An admirable effort to engage today's youth. (websites) (Nonfiction. 7-11) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.