Review of The Magical Girl’s Self-Care Coloring Book

This post is a review of The Magical Girl’s Self-Care Coloring Book – Color Your World and Embrace Your Inner Power. It summarizes my thoughts on Jacque Ayle‘s and Venus Bambisa‘s book. Read to decide whether this book would be good for you or a woman on your gift list.

Disclosure: Ad. The coloring book is a sample of my choice from Pacific Court. The post is not endorsed by them. It is also not endorsed by Jacque Aye, Venus Bambias, nor the publisher Ulysses Press. I wrote it entirely myself and it represents my own 100% honest opinion.

What Type of Coloring Book Is It?

When I ordered the sample, I assumed “The Magic Girl’s Self-Care Coloring Book – Color Your World and Embrace Your Inner Power” would address young teenage girls. However, taking a look at the book, the central thesis—or main topic of self-care is much broader.

While the book covers mental health issues and life situations that may be a first for these soon-to-be young women, the subjects are relevant to adults of all genders. This means this type of coloring book is not a children coloring book for kids in K4 or younger.

Who Will Like to Color the Illustrations of Aye and Bambisa’s Coloring Book?

The suggested self-talks or self-care manta are relevant for adults at any age. They include heartbreak, feeling small, defeated, and/or misunderstood. Further subjects addressed are resting, setting and accepting boundaries, finding love, freeing yourself from expectations, overcoming imposter syndrome, knowing you are more than your career, listening to intuition, anxiety, and healing.

Due to cultural education and societal pressure some of the above mental health issues speak in particular to women. The same is true for the illustrations.

It Is a Self-Care How-To Coloring Book for Adults

The author approaches the above mental health topics on one page each. The book encompasses nine chapters including the introduction and outro. The latter is a Call-to-Action to stay magical and remember the rest.

Each chapter has two mental health related topics discussed on two pages. The following 4 to 5 coloring pages are relevant to the respective  self-care topics. The illustrations feature phantasy persons or creatures that symbolize the attitude that the adult, who colors them, should achieve.

Is It Weird for Adults to Color the Illustrations?

Not at all! The illustrations elucidate the aimed-for empowered self after one’s self-care journey. This means the team clearly articulates the mental health self-care topic/goal in both words and illustrations.

I did enjoy coloring them and didn’t feel weird about it. On the contrary, I felt better than before I started coloring the above two pages.

Tip: Copy the pages before coloring so you can print them out to color them again and again.

How Does this Coloring Book Benefit Self-Care?

In general, the benefit of coloring books for adults is to relax and calm down. In this particular case, the colorist gets sort of a pep-talk with a sentence for self-talk as a start of the solution to their mental health problem. The adult who colors the illustration relaxes thru the coloring process and unconsciously takes up/inhales the attitude to embrace their inner power.

Take-Aways from the Review of The Magical Girl’s Self-Care Coloring Book

In my opinion, in this coloring book’s title, the words “Magic Girl”  could as well be substituted with “The Magic Woman’s Self-care”. However, when we are down, we typically or often feel like a little girl again. Therefore, the word “girl” is appropriate even though this is not a children coloring book.

The book successfully merges the disciplines of psychology with art. It employs coloring as a form of  self-care to relax from daily threads. In this combination, it departs from the conventional adult coloring books that aim at relaxation only.

The coloring motifs of each chapter feature girls, women, animals or phantasy creatures as the empowered, uplifted person. The team aims at using the coloring of these motifs as part of the self-care and – maybe unconsciousness –  uptake of the written message for the “girl’s” self-empowerment journey.

This book teaches survival skills that should have been taught in High School, but aren’t. In my personal coloring experience with this book, the team well succeeds in providing support to adults who color on their self-care journey.

Therefore, I recommend this book as a gift for all young women in your life including you.

Where to Buy “The Magical Girl’s Self-Care Coloring Book”?

You can buy this self-care coloring book, among others, at Barnes & Noble online and in a brick-and-mortar store near you, and online on Amazon as well as Book Soup for $15.95.

Tip: When ordering online compare the shipping costs.

About the Autor Jacque Aye

Dallas-based Nigerian-American Jacque Aye works as a marketing consultant and developmental editor. She is also the author of “The Magical Girl’s Guide to Life”, and “How to Be a Better Adult”, and a future therapist. As a passionate storyteller and mental health advocate, she created the popular Indie comic and lifestyle brand Adorned by Chi, a magical girl manga inspired by Sailor Moon and Nigerian culture. She writes surrealistic, magical fiction about woeful women. More about Jacque Aye.

About the Illustrator Venus Bambisa

Johannesburg, South Africa based illustrator Venus Bambisa is a character concept and comic book artist. Among other things, she has worked on character designs for animations, and on book covers, not only for children books. She works as the art director at Talent Digital Art. Her goal is to inspire people to pursue their dreams. One of her own dreams is to create a never-before-seen intellectual property of her own. More about Venus Bambisa.

Photos: N. Mölders

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