Depicting many types of families and gender expressions, and recognizing that starting a family sometimes requires outside assistance, this joyous book is bound to become a go-to gift for LGBTQ families—though it really works for many different kinds, and that’s the beauty of it.
“Dear Small Human,” it begins. “Many special people did many special things for you to be here today.” They include not only queer and non-queer couples and solo parents, as Brady Soto’s expressive illustrations show us, but also siblings, grandparents, gamete donors, surrogates, and medical, financial, legal, and social service professionals. The diverse families and their helpers dream, plan, and hope across the pages, infusing practical tasks with a whole lot of love. Many have queer-coded haircuts, clothing, or tattoos; others’ identities are more ambiguous. A few read as nonbinary, including one who is pregnant. One couple sings to a pregnant person who could be their surrogate, co-parent, or partner in a throuple.
Several of the illustrations show the different people as part of the same city or neighborhood, offering a sense of connection and community. The last spread is of a group of parents and children gathering for a picnic as the text assures the reader, “We’re happy you’re here.”
Julie Wilkins’s affirming text doesn’t get into details about specific family creation methods, but that’s fine. Other picture books about LGBTQ family creation handle that. Here, the point is not the details but the collective variety. Readers can find particular scenes that speak to them, and use them as jumping off points for their own family conversations. Discussion questions at the end offer ideas for doing so.
This is a book that should find a happy place in almost every home of a new family. Fertility clinics and foster, adoption, and surrogacy agencies would be wise to stock it, too, or at the very least to recommend it to their clients. Does it capture every possible type of family or family-formation task? No—but it captures more than I’ve ever seen in a single book, and it celebrates them all.
Highly recommended.
