"The Rhino Who Swallowed a Storm" By Levar Burton (of Reading Rainbow and Levar Burton Reads podcast! also Star Trek) and Susan Schafer Bernardo, with illustrations by Courtenay Fletcher

​

This picture book is about being small and uncertain, in a world seemingly filled to the brim with horrible situations that you cannot control, that stare at you like they want to eat everything you love whole.

The authors do not shirk away from this and tell you that's silly and everything will be fine.

In prose simple enough for a small child, they acknowledge it, validate the feelings and grief that go with it, and let you wallow.

Then they bring you back up. They show you that when you're ready, there will always be those who are there to help. And that sometimes: you must help yourself. This children's storybook was so beautifully done it made me smile even as my breath was taken away from me.

​

It is about a small mouse who lost her home in a storm and the bedtime story that gets read to her as comfort: about a little blue rhino who was caught in a flood that washed much of his life away, and how he went about trying to cope and trying to heal.

​

This story does exactly what it was meant to do: articulates a traumatic event and acknowledges and validates the emotions that follow a trauma, in a very clear and affirmative way.

And it does so with a little mouse and a blue rhinoceros.