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Title: We Are All the Same Inside
Author: Timothy D. Bellavia
Narrator: Alan Caudle
Format: Unabridged
Length: 3 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-14-14
Publisher: The T.I.M.M.-E. Company, Inc.
Genres: Kids, Ages 8-10
Publisher's Summary:
Listeners are introduced to Sage - an alien with no outside skin - who explores diversity and teaches that we are all the same on the inside. This publication received a Christoper Award nomination for Best Children's Picture Book.
Members Reviews:
Adults should take a 'lesson'
Bellavia's prose follows the conventional rhyme scheme of most children's stories that would lull young ones to sleep-usually. However, that is where the comparisons end-for the most part. "We Are All The Same Inside" works on two distinctly didactic levels: it reenforces the moral-that borders on cliche by the stage of jilted adulthood-that race and color are not a blueprint by which people should be judged, but more relevantly,abstractly and by extension of that platitude, points to a more accessible and far greater lesson that concerns its tike audience more personally and profoundly.
In an age where pre-teens and teenage girls are starving themselves, Bellavia's tome of tolerance takes matters to the next level by subliminally disabusing its readers-some adults included-of the notion that beauty is an entirely external commodity. Through a firm pattern of inversion imagery and double-entendre, Bellavia conveys his point even from the opening lines:
"The moon was bright/and the stars were light/The skies were a mess/It caused great stress"
Radically inverse imagery is used to convey his point. As toddlers and tikes begin to form a perception of the world prior to the age of reason, they attempt to make sense of the world in terms of what they see and what they are told about what they see.
Clearly, any portrait that presents a world order negatively that wherein the "stars were light" but at the same time "The skies were a mess" as the one illuminated by the opening passage, if viewed literally and by those who have attained the age of reason, would jolt parents who perhaps interpret these ideas more literally; reason has its limitations. For a child, the ultimate irony is, they may be more readily able to begin to make sense of the world and grip the moral precisely because restricitions have been put on the value of what they are conventionally told or are empirically judging-albeit falsely-to be beautiful or wise.
By challengingly debunking the myth of the iconography of beauty and popularity, Bellavia dispells what is undesirable and-by extension-may convey the very important lession for children about their place in the world-not just relative to others but themselves as well.
Hence the inversion and the double-entendre, "Sage", an alien,representing a soul and a spirit speaks of a syllogism that elevates the seemingly dry prose.
"I have a mission/.../ I have a soul"/I am you and you don't know".
Sage lives on the same planet, but not the same plane; he is the insider when he is the only perceivable outsider, but the fact that he has a soul and is on the path that humanity should be on means he is the hero or the one who should be revered. Unlike other childrens tomes, where the more popular befriend the less fortunate or the rich are betrothed to the poor, Bellavia suggests that individuality and perseverence and self-reliance are virtuous qualities-something that even adults can take a cue from.