Welcome To Your Period! by Yumi Synes and Dr Melissa Kang

Welcome to Your Period! by Yumi Stynes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Welcome to Your Period! is funny, frank and fearless and I loved every inch of it. Even though I’m roughly three thousand years old at this point (hello 2020!), it took me back to the sex education classes we all received at school. All of the girls were taken into a separate room (with our parents!!!) and told that lots of things would soon be happening to us, have fun with that, here’s a tampon.

I mean, what was life? If only I could time travel back to that room of increasingly baffled children and give them this. Welcome To Your Period! is like a paperback big sister – it covers everything you need to know. It really does cover everything: there’s information here on period poops through to how to manage your period while swimming. The information! The glorious, lovely, accessible information! And all of it madly, beautifully put together!

(I’m going to pause here to tell you and my librarian friends in particular, to stop reading this review and get a copy of this on order now. It is absolutely made for library shelves).

I also loved how this inclusive this book is. Jenny Latham’s illustrations are a delight with their fat, luscious use of colour and detail. She depicts people of all shapes and colour, people with body hair, people with period leaks on clothing (! the frank delight of this book!) and smiling period undies with a delightful, thick roundness. This is fine inclusivity, and I was so pleased to spot this attitude throughout the book. It refers to “people who menstruate” and has a very welcome trans-inclusive attitude throughout (with specific advice given to young people in this situation). So good. Well done.

I’m grateful to Little Tiger (who are publishing this in the UK) for the review copy. It’s a good, timely, important book and I’m pleased it’s coming here.



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