Review: The Story of You by Gerald Schaefer

In The Story of You, a brightly illustrated book for thoughtful children, author Gerald Schaefer finds straightforward yet colorful ways to help overcome many of life’s negative moments.

Schaefer opens his story with a welcome to our world of flowers, hummingbirds, and other natural phenomena, which help to build the notion of the connectedness of all life. He states that trees and flowers, for example, “appreciate” being looked at; our gaze perks them up in various ways, and makes us feel good, too. Inside each of us is another self, an “invisible you,” Schaefer reveals; though it can’t be seen or touched, it can be felt in times of solitude and quiet. It can make us feel powerful, make us forget about the passing of time, and when someone calls, it can be a surprise, so deep is the concentration on what the author calls the Sky Self.

The Sky Self provides us with extra layers of perception and protection and helps us to find safe places of warmth and peace. Knowing this, children can understand that we are more than our bodies, and more than our likes of certain things and dislike of others:

You might feel your Invisible Self sometimes when you’re playing in the mud or cuddling with your cat, and you forget about time….You don’t feel like you’re separate from them. That’s your Sky Self. It feels connected to everything.

This is not a very common theme for a children’s book, and so many parents may recoil from the more New Age aspects of Schaefer’s storytelling, but it will certainly be appealing to parents of that demographic. Still, Schaefer’s narrative is so unassuming that the book hardly feels like proselytizing. Moreso, it has a convincing innocence, and so comes off as both authentic and inspiring.

This is heightened by the illustrations being by kids themselves, which was a deft choice by the author. Children will not only be able to see themselves in the childlike drawings, but this sense of connection will then carry on to the text itself, which is precisely Shaefer’s goal.

That said, there are concepts in the book that will need a fair amount of elucidation by parents: “If someone puts a hand on your shoulder, Sky knows whether it feels good or icky.” These are important considerations, but will take a lot of dialogue to unpack. There is a fair degree of complexity and sophistication required for some of Schaefer’s concepts that may be lost on a young child. On balance, however, the book provides an empowering message, which a child may not understand implicitly, but may reach them on a more intuitive level.

Children will undoubtedly have the most fun poring through the pictures. The illustrations, which appear on every page, are not only emotive as pictures, but often contain text that matches the narrative. For instance, the real, physical self is contrasted by colored clouds hovering above a boy and girl standing side by side. Such images give deeper credence to the meaningful ideas throughout Schaefer’s carefully crafted guide.

All in all, The Story of You provides lively scenarios that can be studied well beyond the page and evoke further conversation in both home and school environments.