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All About U.S. — A Look at the Lives of 50 Real Kids from Across the United States

a layout from the book 'All About U.S.'

Matt Lamothe and Jenny Volvovski wrote an illustrated a new book called All About U.S. (Bookshop), which features a look into the lives of 50 kids from the US, one from each state. From the website:

All About U.S. is a non-fiction children’s book, featuring 50 real kids from each state in the United States. The goal of this book is to create an authentic portrait of the country, showcasing the diversity of its people and the vastness of its natural landscapes.

We conducted over 100 hours of interviews, received 20 hours of home tour footage and hundreds of photographs, to create the illustrations and short stories about each family.

It sounds like they worked hard at finding kids from all kinds of different backgrounds (especially with just 50 slots to fill):

- Families who live in a variety of dwellings, from houseboats and yurts to farms, Native reservations, and Air Force bases

- Children with adoptive families, stepfamilies, single-parent families, two moms or dads, and those who live with their grandparents

- Children living with health conditions such as leukemia and muscular dystrophy

- Families from a range of social, religious, and economic backgrounds

This looks like a fantastic book — you can read more about it on the website or pre-order from Amazon or Bookshop.

Discussion  1 comment

Josh Fischel

Highly recommend his earlier work, This is How We Do It, which takes you through the lives of seven children around the world, ages 7-11. What they eat, what they learn in school, how they spend their free time—my six year old has loved it for years.

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