Everybelly

Winner of the 2025 Kirkus Prize! A joyful celebration of an oft-maligned body part — the belly!

Maddie and her mom spend a sunny day at the local public pool where she meets and greets friends and neighbors. Maddie is waist-high on most of them, and she knows there’s an interesting person behind every belly she passes — like Jackie, the artist with a splatter of ice cream across their belly. Maddie’s splatter painting often leaves Mama speechless, too!

The poolside belly parade keeps Maddie musing: How bellies can make excellent tables, how hard some people work to keep their bellies flat when Maddie prefers her belly full, and how you should never, ever stick your hands in other people’s bellies, no matter how soft and doughy they might look. (Maddie’s cat taught her that the hard way.)

As Maddie dances, swims and makes the long climb up to the diving board, Thao Lam’s celebrated cut-paper collage portrays bellies and bodies of all shapes and sizes — bellies with scars, tattooed bellies, growing bellies, growling bellies, bellies with six-packs, stretch marks, insulin monitors, freckles and more — proving that every belly deserves its place in the sun.

Key Text Features

illustrations

Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.K.4

Ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.4

Identify words and phrases in stories or poems that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses.

THAO LAM is the best-selling, critically acclaimed author/illustrator of Happy Birthday to Me, THAO, My Cat Looks Like My Dad, and The Paper Boat, named a best book of 2020 by Kirkus, Booklist, School Library Journal, the Globe and Mail, CBC and others. She studied illustration at Sheridan College and has an insatiable love of colored and textured papers, which she uses to create her exuberant collages. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.

THAO LAM is the best-selling, critically acclaimed author/illustrator of Happy Birthday to Me, THAO, My Cat Looks Like My Dad, and The Paper Boat, named a best book of 2020 by Kirkus, Booklist, School Library Journal, the Globe and Mail, CBC and others. She studied illustration at Sheridan College and has an insatiable love of colored and textured papers, which she uses to create her exuberant collages. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.

• Kirkus Prize for Young Readers' LiteratureWinner 2025