Author Seamus Kirst and illustrator Karen Bunting bring us another charming story of the two-dad family featured in Dad and Daddy’s Big Family and Harper Becomes a Big Sister, this time focusing on what it means to be a sibling.
One day on the playground, Harper and younger brother Wyatt meet a pair of twin boys. When one asks why Harper and Wyatt look “totally different,” she explains that they’re adopted.
One of the twins responds, “So he’s not your real brother.”
Wyatt starts to cry, and Harper thinks about the boy’s comment. Was he right? “NO!” she thinks definitively. She tells him that she knows they’re real siblings because when he laughs or cries, she wants to do the same; how she wants to share toys even when he’s annoying; because they always forgive each other when they argue; and because there are some things she only wants to tell him. Wyatt agrees that he knows they’re real siblings because she reads him stories, checks under his bed for monsters, and helped him learn to swim.
Most of all, Harper says, she knows they are real siblings “because I feel it in my heart.” They affirm their love for each other “Forever and ever and always.”
Kirst’s straightforward words capture sweet moments of family life, which Bunting expands upon in warmly colored, dynamic illustrations. Many families will make a welcome place for this recommended title on their bookshelves—read it along with Kirst and Bunting’s other stories about the family, or with Real Sisters Pretend, by Megan Dowd Lambert, which explores the same theme in a two-mom family.
Harper and one dad have medium-brown skin and dark brown hair, Wyatt has lighter brown skin, and the other dad reads as White.
