Photo

Chelsea ClintonCredit RB/Bauer-Griffin, via GC Images, via Getty Images

One of the most striking moments in Hillary Clinton’s newly released State Department emails was not something written by Hillary but by her daughter, Chelsea, who had just returned from a fact-gathering trip to post-earthquake Haiti. The email starts:

To: Dad, Mom

Cc: Cheryl, Doug, Justin

There is a context section at the bottom, which is longer than I would like, but I think it is important to articulate what I saw and whom I spoke with (and what I didn’t see and whom I didn’t meet) so that you understand my data set and its clear limitations. To say I was profoundly disturbed by what I saw — and didn’t see — would be an understatement... As is often said, if I had more time — and less emotion — I would have written a shorter letter. I hope this mini-behemoth is not rife with grammatical errors or inadvertent gaps; I am sorry if either true.

Chelsea Clinton may be, like her mother, a little hard to pin down as a personality, but three things seem inarguable after reading that email: She has a big heart, she writes an excellent policy paper and she is verbose. The voice you hear there addressing “Mom” and “Dad” — both wonky and sweet, impassioned and didactic, a little self-conscious — is pretty much the same one we hear in her new book for children, “It’s Your World.” It’s clear that she indeed wrote it herself, all 400 or so earnest, methodically compiled pages. The book is meant to help kids feel empowered and get involved in making change in the world, and at that length, it’s indeed a mini-behemoth in a genre of children’s books that don’t involve magic and are not written by the likes of J.K. Rowling or Rick Riordan. Clinton surveys pretty much every problem known to humankind — including poverty, global warming, obesity, gender inequality and cancer. She breaks it all down with statistics, adds a little historical context and offers a look at some solutions, both the governmental kind and the things individuals can do to make a difference.

Where she succeeds is in making even the knottiest issues seem accessible to a bright seventh grader. In fact, she writes in a style that would seem perfectly at home in a stack of middle-school term papers. (“In my lifetime, a number of countries across the world granted women the right to vote for the first time. Having the right to vote is often only a first step. Being able to safely exercise that right is often harder, even dangerous for some women ... and men alike. In many countries where women are denied a meaningful right to vote, men are too. To be clear, that shared inequality and lack of rights is nothing to celebrate.”) There are abundant references to what she has already told us, or will tell us later, a tic teachers seem to love, but alas, no one else. (“As mentioned in ‘Time for School’ ” — an earlier chapter — “globally, girls are not in school at levels equal to boys.”)

The book is packed with statistics that are eye-opening, as statistics can be, but the nonstop river of them also seems curiously unsuited to a book that aims to change hearts and minds. (“The number of kids who die from malaria in Africa has dropped by more than half since 2000”; “More than one in five food-insecure households have had someone serve in the military”).

Will its intended audience actually read “It’s Your World?” If by “reading” you mean what many schools these days prioritize and encourage — plucking out information, ideally with highlighter in hand — then yes, young people who are looking for ways to help, and to be involved in the workings of the world, should learn a lot from “It’s Your World.” There is some real inspiration here. Clinton includes many “illustrative examples” of young people who work to stamp out those problems. We hear, for example, about Cassandra, from Rhode Island, who created Turn Grease Into Fuel, a group of kids who “recruit local restaurants to donate their used cooking oil to local organizations that can then turn it into home heating oil,” so far “helping prevent more than three million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions from being released.” Clinton introduces and provides web addresses for worthy organizations that do great things with tiny amounts of money that individuals donate, like the microloan organization Kiva or Heifer International, which provides farm animals to poor families around the globe. Giving to them is a fantastic idea.

But the choice to address her readers in a personal voice seems like a mistake. Clinton strives for relatability, offering stories about her grandmothers and her early life in Arkansas. They are all, unfortunately, dull. We open with a glimpse of young Chelsea reading the newspaper at home in Little Rock “as I ate my morning Cheerios,” before discussing world events with her parents, which she did “around the dinner table every night and intensely after church on Sunday over lunch.” As she grows up and moves on to trips to India and other global crisis spots with her mother, somehow the stories don’t get much more exciting. On the evidence we get here, she is a kind of humanitarian Tracy Flick, but there is no comeuppance or sudden twist of fortune on the horizon. As bighearted as she is, hers is not the kind of voice that makes for a riveting children’s book. Young readers crave emotional directness, and they appreciate a little buildup and suspense. As a glimpse at the children’s best-seller lists makes clear, they respond best to stories of people in extreme situations, people who face major problems, struggle and triumph, like “I Am Malala,” a book that shares many of Clinton’s empowering goals. Chelsea Clinton, however, is not Malala (who also had an experienced co-author), and would have been wise to step back a little from the flow of the book.

On the evidence of “It’s Your World,” Clinton feels a lot for other people. But it mainly seems as if she feels sorry for them, and that’s ultimately where “It’s Your World” reaches its limits. This is not a book destined to influence hearts and minds in the way “I Am Malala” has done — by helping children to understand the slow way change can happen and to truly feel a part of that magic. Nor is it a book like Jenna Bush’s “Ana’s Story,” which in 2007 offered young readers an intimate account of one Latin American girl’s journey from orphaned H.I.V. baby to single mother and, like “Malala,” allowed readers to empathize with another young person’s struggle.

In Clinton’s book, the people who need help feel very far away. “What’s important to recognize is that in the U.S. today, tens of millions of kids start life on an uneven playing field,” Clinton writes. “Imagine having to try to run a race if you started 10 yards behind everyone else, hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning, or maybe even dinner the night before, had slept in your third homeless shelter that month and didn’t have shoes that fit right.” But imagine the children who read that, and who fall into one of those categories – imagine how that would sting, to read your life packaged that way, as someone else’s entirely imaginary nightmare. A truly good children’s book has to connect with a huge range of readers, not just inform them.