The Art of Play: Recess and the Practice of Invention. By Anna R. Beresin. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 191, acknowledgements, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, references, index. $25.95 paper.)Children's folklore has been the beneficiary of many prolific advocates in the discipline. The tradition of advocacy begins with William Wells Newell in the late part of the nineteenth century and continues through more recent scholars and collectors such as Iona and Peter Opie, Brian Sutton-Smith, and Simon J. Bronner. With her recent work on children's play, folklorist Anna R. Beresin adds her name to that list. In her 2011 book, Recess Battles: Fighting, Playing, and Storytelling, she examined violence in the schoolyard and the benefits of play. In 2014's The Art of Play, Beresin follows up with an ethnographic description of her service-learning efforts and those of the organization Recess Access with whom she works to provide Philadelphia schoolchildren with materials that encourage creativity and activity at school. She gives the children art materials and then observes and responds to their artistic creations, displaying the paintings of more than one hundred children in this book.Beresin describes The Art of Play as pairing of narratives-the telling of the tales of Recess Access schools from 2010 to 2012 and the examination of the intersection between art and (9). In this book, she details the conditions of eight Philadelphia schools in which recess was either nonexistent or consistently removed as a punishment for bad behavior, and then chronicles the positive effects on children's behavior when they have access to even the simplest play materials: chalk, paint, balls, and jump ropes. Beresin's portrait of children at play depicts the creativity that children possess when provided with the most basic resources, and when the process of creation is unhampered by oppressive and stifling adult power constructs.The biggest difference between Beresin's latest book and a work like Bronner's American Childrens Folklore or Sutton-Smith's The Folkstories of Children is simply a matter of what each author chooses to emphasize. Bronner and SuttonSmith lean heavily on folkloric text, providing the reader with a catalogue of various kinds of children's folklore concentrated into a single encyclopedic volume. Beresin, on the other hand, deals largely with context, texture, and benefits of children's play. By choosing not to separate the children from the games they play and stories they tell, she captures the creative vibrancy of children's play, and the playfulness children bring to the act of creating art.Beresin's writing style and tone throughout the book tend to match the content which she is describing. …