Flap Your Hands

Review
By Publishers Weekly

Four children flutter, flap, and rock their way from overwhelmed to centered in an arrestingly illustrated introduction to the concept of self-regulatory movement from Asbell, making his picture book debut. Listing examples of stims—from repetitive movements (“Your feet might kick like splashy flippers”) to vocal variations (“choosing a word with funny sounds/ one that feels just right for you”)—rhythmic text invites readers to “try a stim” in response to bubbling-over feelings that “have no place to go.” In saturated digitally rendered illustrations, close-packed, scratchboard-like lines radiate outward from four characters of varying skin tones, creating a frenzied, blurred rainbow that obscures specific details. Clarity sharpens as the children regulate, until the primary figures and backgrounds come into focus over the symbol of neurodivergent pride, and page turns reveal one child in a grocery store, another walking alongside traffic, one experiencing a birthday, and another at a bus stop. Relying on this emphatic visual manifestation to contextualize feelings of dysregulation, this aptly experiential representation of stimming foregrounds the idea that “no feeling is too huge to handle—// No noise too jarring to bear—// When everyone’s allowed to stim// And celebrate who they are!”