Gay Farmers Become Dads (and a Rooster Learns a Lesson) in New Kids’ Book With Delightful Wordplay

Clever wordplay, adorable animals, gay farmers, and adoption: this new picture book, the sequel to an award-winning predecessor, has it all.

A Kid of Their Own, written by Megan Dowd Lambert and illustrated by Jessica Lanan (Charlesbridge), is the sequel to Lambert’s charming 2016 Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Honor Book, A Crow of His Own (illustrated by David Hyde Costello). In the new tale, Clyde the rooster has trouble adjusting to the arrival of nanny goat Fran and her kid, Rowdy. Clyde regards Rowdy as competition for “motherly goose” Roberta’s attention, and tries to get it back with an extra-loud morning crow. This wakes Rowdy, but doesn’t deter Clyde from continuing his raucous outbursts whenever Rowdy is napping. Anyone who’s ever had an older sibling act out when a new one arrives will be able to sympathize.

Finally, though, Clyde learns his lesson, apologizes, and comes up with a solution that will allow him to keep expressing himself while also letting Rowdy rest. This prepares the animals to be warm and welcoming when their humans, Farmer Kevin and Farmer Jay, come home  with a kid of their own. “Look who’s here. It’s Riley’s adoption day!” says Farmer Kevin. In the closing illustration, we see the three humans surrounded by the adoring farm community.

In some comments she shared last June for the book’s cover reveal (which I had the honor of doing here at Mombian), Lambert explained her reasons for the combination of anthropomorphic animals and humans:

While I’m sure part of the reason I created this world in which animals and people live and work together as quasi-peers can be directly traced to my 1970s childhood affection for “The Muppet Show” and “Sesame Street,” I wanted to juxtapose queer humans with animal characters to overtly point out that there’s a difference! A lot of children’s books that are read as queer texts feature anthropomorphic animals and objects as stand-ins for queer people; there are penguins, and worms, and crayons, and bears coded as queer, and just plain not enough humans. Although I like many of those books very much, the reluctance to center queer people in children’s books suggests to me a calculated distancing of queer content from readers on the part of the market.

(Another recent picture book that uses that same combination of human queer parents and anthropomorphic animals (though I don’t know if it’s for the same reasons) is the delightful Princess Puffybottom … and Darryl (about which more here), which has a similar theme of new children. It has a different setting, though (inside a house), only two animals (a cat and a dog), and distinctly different protagonists. I heartily recommend both books.)

The variety and fun of the language Lambert uses make her book stand out in the picture-book genre. There are puns (“Clyde will get hoarse if he keeps this up,” says the horse) as well as subtler jokes (“I was a perfect troll to you,” Clyde tells Fran. “Water under the bridge,” she replies). Readers of all ages will have fun finding them. “I wrote the kind of text my eldest son, Rory (now 22) in particular, loved to read as a child,” Lambert said in her cover-reveal comments.

Lambert also writes in an author’s note that, just as in A Crow of His Own, she has avoided dialogue tags like “said” and “asked,” opting instead for other words, “to underscore the idea that everyone’s unique voice is important when creating an inclusive community.” We see verbs like “gushed,” “sputtered,” “fretted,” “gasped,” “huffed,” and more—nothing terribly complex for the target age range (four to eight years old, according to the publisher), but adding a richness of language not always seen in picture books.

Yet as in the best picture books, both words and pictures are needed to tell the tale. Lanan’s watercolor illustrations convey both the liveliness and warmth of life on the farm and often advance parts of the story that aren’t explicit in the text. Jay and Kevin’s loving relationship is shown clearly but never made the main focus; they simply have their arms around each other on a couple of pages. We also see a rainbow bumper sticker on their truck (and on the back flap).

Lambert herself is “the mother of seven children in a blended, queer, adoptive family,” she tells us on the book’s back flap. She also explained to me how her experience informed the book’s title:

Sometimes when people find out I’ve adopted children, they ask “Do you have any kids of your own?” I reject that phrasing as careless since it risks diminishing the sense of belonging that adoptees need and deserve to feel in their families. All of my children are “my own”—the four who came home to us through adoption, and the three who were born to me. But, in claiming my adopted children as “my own,” and in naming Farmer Kevin and Farmer Jay’s child, Riley, as “a kid of their own,” I don’t wish to erase the importance of first families (or biological or birth families) in adoptees’ lives and identities. First and foremost, children are their own people, each with the right to their own histories and stories.

Her picture book Real Sisters Pretend, illustrated by Nicole Tadgell (Tilbury House) also focuses on an adoptive family, giving us the story of two sisters (with two moms) exuberantly using their imaginations but reaffirming that their sisterhood is not pretend.

When she’s not writing picture books, Lambert is a senior lecturer in children’s literature at Simmons College. She has also served on the 2009 Geisel, 2011 Caldecott, and the 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Committees. Her deep knowledge of the genre and her thoughtful, humorous use of language, combined with her personal experience and insights, make A Kid of Their Own a terrific addition to anyone’s library.