“Ferret strolled to school in style,/All silky fur and cheerful smile.” While one of her two moms stays home with her baby sibling, Ferret walks to school with the other, confident and cool—until she trips on the way in, then accidentally slams the classroom door. The embarrassing moments continue through the day: Ferret is off-beat during music class, makes a mess during craft time, and comes back from the restroom with toilet paper on her shoe. Things build to a crescendo when she gets the hiccups, triggering a cascade of burps and snorts from the rest of the class … which only stop when the teacher herself farts, causing the class to burst into giggles.
But the teacher isn’t one to lose an instructional opportunity. “All of us have things go wrong/It doesn’t mean we don’t belong,” she tells the class. The students then practice niceties like “Pardon me” and “You’re excused,” and Ferret realizes that her embarrassing moments are actually quite normal. The school day settles into order … almost. I won’t spoil the surprise at the end, but it’s a funny flourish that should resonate with kids and adults alike.
Author Lisa Frenkel Riddiough’s rhymes are spot-on, setting the upbeat tone of the story from the start and deftly balancing humor and compassion. The illustrations, by Andrea Tsurumi, add to both the humor and to readers’ understanding of the characters’ emotions.
The queer content here is incidental to the tale, but Ferret’s moms are clear on the first page, where one kisses the other goodbye. At school, the teacher’s desk sports a Progress Pride flag sticking out of the pencil cup, though whether this indicates the teacher’s identity as queer or as an ally isn’t clear (but doesn’t matter for the purpose of this story; it’s a happy indication that queer people are welcome in the classroom, either way). Ferret, while using she/her pronouns, wears a red-and-yellow t-shirt, red sneakers, blue jeans, and star necklace that seem to convey a gender expression somewhere between masculine and feminine, a nice change from the often very feminine girl characters in many other picture books.
The humorous rhymes and amusing images may keep young readers laughing so much they won’t even realize they’re being taught a lesson, making this a highly recommended title. It’s the first book in the Forest School of Big Feelings series from the creative duo, and I can’t wait for the next.
