Dorothy, a dalmatian, “was proud of her two dads.” She helps them learn about long walks, doggy bathtimes, and splendid dinner parties. Life is good—until her dads bring home a “noisy, floppy, screechy, smelly baby!” Dorothy’s life is upended as the baby interrupts the family’s former routines, bringing chaos (and a lot of smelly accidents) to the home. The pooch longs for their old routine, but tries her best to continue helping out.
One day, however, Dorothy accidentally makes the baby giggle, through a series of amusing circumstances I’ll leave for readers to discover. Dorothy is entranced by the wonderful sound of the baby’s giggle, and sees how happy it also makes the dads. Maybe the baby isn’t so bad after all, she thinks. Soon, Dorothy becomes the baby’s companion on walks and in helping clean up the baby’s dropped food at dinnertime. She’s proud of both her dads and the baby—and in a final scene that shows them in a Pride march with other families, we learn that “on very special days, she got to celebrate them with the world.”
This is a sweet story about a growing family, delightfully told and charmingly illustrated. It’s not “about” the dads’ queerness, but includes a nice nod to LGBTQ culture. To that extent, I recommend it. It is, however, the fourth book in recent years to show a same-sex couple getting a new baby, told from the perspective of the family’s aggrieved animal (after Patience, Patches!, Princess Puffybottom … and Darryl, and I, Lincoln, Did Not Ask For This). Proud Dog is the first such one with a two-dad couple, however, and may thus be seen as filling a gap—but two other titles, Frank and the Bad Surprise and Pickles + Ocho, are told from the perspective of a dog in a two-man family when a second pup arrives, addressing the same theme of new siblings, so the gap isn’t really that large.
As I said in my review of Patience, Patches, animal analogies can be fun, but there’s also something to be said for human representation, especially in communities like the LGBTQ one, where children may never have seen another family like theirs in real life. We still need more picture books about human families with LGBTQ parents told from the perspective of a human child getting a new sibling, touching on their varied experiences and any of the many methods the family may have used to grow. While a few books in recent years have started to address that (see the Siblings (New) tag and look for ones that don’t have animals on the cover), there are many more such tales to be told.
That doesn’t take away from the fun of the books told from animal perspectives, which are all adorable, but I hope authors and publishers consider new directions going forward.
One dad and the baby are White; the other has light brown skin and dark brown hair.
