A series of seven books about a girl with two moms, which first launched 10 years ago, is now complete—a work of love by two sisters and a friend.
The Jessie Books include one story for each day of the week as they follow a young girl named Jessie on her everyday adventures with her moms, relatives, friends, and nanny in Queens, New York. There are gentle lessons about perseverance, imagination, and kindness—and the fact that Jessie has two moms is purely incidental to the tales.
The books were co-authored and self-published by sisters Phylliss DelGreco and the late Kathryn Silverio, along with Jaclyn Roth, inspired by their own parenting experiences. They were illustrated by Rory Smith. DelGreco is an intellectual property and technology attorney and has been openly out in the workplace since 1991. Roth has two daughters: Jessie, now 14 years old and the initial inspiration for the books, and Addison, 10 years old. Siverio was a writer, editor, and designer, and her daughter Katie is now grown-up and an astrophysicist.
“The characters in The Jessie Books just are—they love, they laugh, they nurture, they support, they care, they challenge, they teach,” said DelGreco in a press statement. “I hope that The Jessie Books can have that impact in some small way and help families and children see themselves.”
Roth added, “These books show LGBTQ families are no different than any other family, and evidence the ease in which stories of LGBTQ families with children at the center can be told. After all, a family built on love, respect and harmony is universal.”
Young readers will likely appreciate Jessie’s kids’-eye observations about her world. The stories are pure dialog, which helps immerse readers in Jessie’s world, although the lack of dialog tags make it occasionally hard to tell who is speaking. The books are clearly meant to be enjoyed as a set—the Wednesday book, for example, only mentions Jessie’s mommy; read as a standalone, one would never know she has two moms. The illustrations capture Jessie’s wide-eyed interest in the world around her. Jessie and her moms are White; other children are a diversity of skin tones. Jessie’s nanny Georgia, who features prominently on Monday and Friday, is Black, as is Georgia’s family, whom Jessie visits on Friday. While they may lack a little of the polish found in books from larger publishers, they are an earnest and heartfelt expression of love by the creators. They’ve put their own experiences and a decade of work into them, capturing a week of Jessie’s life in order to give readers many weeks of reading and re-reading.
Read more about the individual books in the series at their entries in my database: