The Spaces In Between - Jaspreet Kaur - ★★★.¼

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AUTHOR: Jaspreet Kaur
ILLUSTRATOR: Manjit Thapp
GENRE: Children's Nonfiction
RATING: 3.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: Love the intent and the parting note about ‘mindfulness in the city.’ The content left me with mixed feelings.


Cities can be overwhelming. Storybooks often highlight the joy and peace of country living, and cities are shown as busy and bustling places with lots of noise and crowds. The portrayal is valid, no doubt. But does this mean that city dwellers can seek no respite from the noise? Where can children who feel anxious about city hyperactivity find their safe bubble? The book offers some potential spots of respite, where children can take a breather.

At the end of the book is a two-page note about how we can practise mindfulness in the city. This has some helpful and practical tips on finding inner calm. My favourite section of this book, by far.

I loved the idea behind the book. Calming spaces are very important, and especially for sensitive children who live in cities, it will be reassuring to know that they too have several options of relaxing their senses within the city. Some of the options offers are quite sensible: parks, coffee shops, libraries,.. However, I couldn’t understand how a bus or a train might lead to peace of mind. A bus can be overcrowded or stuck in traffic. And as far as the train is concerned, the idea of standing beside the platform and watching the trains come and go to escape the crowd negates the line on an earlier page that indicates the overwhelming of the senses caused by “the thundering trains go(ing) clitter clatter.”

Rather than focussing only on external public spots, the book could have highlighted the importance of finding your own peace through music or through creative hobbies such as colouring or craft. Some of these self-calming options are explored in the final note but not in the main content.

The content is written in simple rhythmic prose in the ABCB scheme. When a picture book uses rhymes, I like the lines to adhere to a consistent metre so that reading the verses aloud in cadence is easy. That doesn’t happen in this book. The verses are quite free flow, and the metre varies from sentence to sentence. So the rhymes herein did not work for me.

The illustrations were good in terms of their detailing, though somewhat muted in their colour tone. The humans are diverse, with the main character seemingly of South Asian origin. However, at times, the illustrations did not match the content on that page. Also, some of the illustrations showed us a view, as seen through windows, of people doing relaxing things inside their homes. This left me with mixed feelings. Are the sketches unintentionally promoting the idea of peeking into others’ houses to find the peaceful “spaces in between”?

All in all, I loved the heart of the book, but I feel that the implementation could have been somewhat fine-tuned. It still offers a lot to its target age group of kids aged 4-7 years. Recommended but to be read with other supporting material and with adult guidance and discussion.

My thanks to Mayo Clinic Press Kids and NetGalley for the DRC of “The Spaces In Between”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

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