What do you do if you’re sure a gremlin is sneaking into your house at night, but your moms don’t believe you? That’s the dilemma for a girl named Emlyn, star of Emlyn and the Gremlin
“In the little blue house with the weathervane loose, Emlyn lived with her Mummy, her Mama, and Moose,” the rolling rhyme begins. The story continues as Emlyn discovers her moms’ secret and figures out how to meet the gremlin who has been sneaking into their home under the nose of their Great Dane.
Emlyn is the only-partly fictional creation of Canadian author Steff F. Kneff, an English professor and Ph.D student in creative writing. Kneff and her wife are raising their real-life daughter Emlyn and do indeed have a Great Dane. (Kneff’s website is silent on the matter of actual gremlins, however.) It was the real Emlyn who inspired Kneff to turn from writing literary fiction (under the name Stevie Mikayne) to writing children’s books.
What I love about the book is that it treats the matter of the two moms as purely incidental. Yes, we sometimes need books that explain what it means to be an LGBTQ family or person. Sometimes, however, we just need to be in the story, and it doesn’t have to be about harassment or marriage. (One good previous example of this is Jennifer Bryan’s 2006 book The Different Dragon
Our kids need books that represent their families, not only so that others will understand them, but so they understand themselves and where they’ve come from—in most cases, a place of deliberate planning and extraordinary love.
I wanted to write a kids’ book that teachers, parents, friends, and our daughter herself could pick off the shelf and enjoy for what it was — a fun adventure that featured a two-mum family in a totally natural way.
I wanted an iconic, recognisable example that people could point to, like Ellen & Portia. “Oh, your friend at school has two mums? Like in the Emlyn and the Gremlin books?” A story that lesbian parents could read aloud to their kids, wrapping their families up in a story that represented their experience.
Kneff already has a second Emlyn and the Gremlin book due out next month, and a third in December. An ongoing series about a family with LGBT parents? Yes, please.
Illustrator Luke Spooner adds a nice touch with colorful textured backgrounds on many of the pages. I wish he’d made Emlyn look a little less serious in some of the pictures, though — and it would have been nice if the whole family was smiling in the first image we see of the three of them (like Kneff and her family in the photo to the right). Still, the story itself is a cheerful one, with plenty of dramatic suspense to keep readers reading. (I’ve read far too many picture books that fail that basic task.)
Add Emlyn and the Gremlin
Find out more at Kneff’s website, and watch her interview on CTV (under her real name, Stephanie Kain).
(In other news about LGBTQ-inclusive children’s books, I’m very happy to see that the Flamingo Rampant Book Club, which I wrote about last month, has exceeded its funding goal on Kickstarter and will thus happen.)
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