Do you hear that? “They’re snapping shut their purses and stepping out of shuttles from the airport.” It’s the aunts (including one who could be trans or nonbinary), ready to enthusiastically overwhelm with their hugs and gifts and exuberant presence in this hilarious story.
Author Adam Rex’s fast-paced text and illustrator Lian Cho’s images work in tandem to convey the chaos precipitated by the aunts’ arrival at the home of one young girl. They bring snacks and hand sanitizer, and they’ve remembered (perhaps inaccurately) the girl’s love of horses. They’re ready to see the sights, to exclaim loudly at the museum, to sleep in her bedroom while she is bumped to the couch.
The action builds throughout the aunts’ visit, and the girl gets increasingly exhausted—but when a Red Riding Hood-style wolf shows up at the table, the aunts are ready to defend their niece. The girl then snuggles in the protective circle of her aunts’ arms. Despite being exasperating, the aunts are family.
The text is a blend of prose and occasional rhyme, a mixture that somehow adds to the hilarity. There are both second-person observations as if the reader is the protagonist (“They give you a newspaper article about wolves and a very small packet of peanuts they saved you from the airplane”) and dialogue from the aunts themselves. Somehow it all works wonderfully.
The girl and her parents have light brown skin and black hair; two aunts have differing shades of brown skin, one is White, and one reads as Asian. It’s unclear if the masculine-looking aunt is a trans man who kept the “aunt” title after transition, a nonbinary person who uses the title, or a gender creative woman, but it’s nice to see the inclusion of gender variety. I’ve tagged this book for all of the above identities, not to dictate, but to let readers searching for such representation decide for themselves.
My only caution is that girl is clearly less than thrilled about the aunts’ hugging and cheek pinching and hair fixing. It would probably be a good idea to pair this tale with one about consent—the aunts might actually offer a nice segue to such a discussion.
Many of us have at least one relative like the overwhelming aunts, but, as with chickens, more are funnier. This book is for every child ever overwhelmed by a relative’s visit and would make an exceptional read-aloud.
