This cheery, rhyming book produced by California Cryobank is an ode to family diversity and is available to read free at the link above. The company will also be doing some hard-copy giveaways at their Instagram page in the coming months (second half of 2023).
The non-gendered protagonist of the story is a shaggy, one-eyed creature who introduces us to a green, two-eyed mom, noting that the two of them are very different, but they love each other. We see them doing a variety of everyday activities, like drawing, counting the stars, and making kitchen-chair forts. Their love, the protagonist says, “makes us a family.”
They then introduce us to extended family members, a variety of fantastical creatures with a variety of families: twin cousins Bee and Boo have a Mama and a Pops; another cousin has a Mommy and a Meema; yet another cousin has a Mapa (who uses they/them pronouns). The narrator shares a little about each family group and what they like to do, always reinforcing that their love “makes them a family.” Notably, each creature looks a little different than at least one parent, and each family group looks different from the other extended family groups, reinforcing the idea that members of a family don’t have to look alike.
There are other messages woven in here, too, about being comfortable with being different: Pops has horns, and “He uses them to open cans/and play guitar/and scour pans,/and if the others point and stare/Pops and Bee and Boo don’t care.”
Author Stephanie Lysaght keeps the rhymes moving jauntily along, making this a delight to read—and I say that as someone who is often skeptical about rhyming children’s books because so often the rhymes feel forced. Here, they work well. A final page with a blank heart outline invites readers to “Draw what love means to you.”
I like that a two-mom couple and a nonbinary parent are included here—and it’s the only children’s book I’m aware of that uses the nonbinary parental title “Mapa.” For readers with parents who go by “Mapa” (or for the parents themselves), this will be welcome (albeit non-human) representation. For others, it may simply be a lighthearted story about family diversity, but there’s much value in that, too.
