A hysterically funny tale of a child and one dad trying to lure the child’s other dad out of bed in the morning.
Dada Henry doesn’t want to get up in the morning, despite the fact that Papa Milo has made pancakes. “I feel like a raincloud,” he says. Papa Milo speculates that Dada Henry doesn’t like pancakes anymore. The problem? Pancakes are Milo’s only specialty.
Milo therefore asks the kids, Lily, Lena, and Gwendolyn, what he should make. They suggest concoctions only a kid could conceive of: “Good Morning Green Ice Cream”—a blend of pickles, spinach, mayonnaise, and ice cream; “Brussels Sprouts Forget Me Never”—consisting of brussels sprouts, blue cheese, bananas, and caramel fudge; and several more besides. Milo gamely whips them up, but nothing tempts Henry out of his room. Does the perfect dish exist? Will Henry ever rejoin his family?
The denouement is both silly and filled with family love, and Gray-Barnett’s illustrations exude joyful chaos throughout, making this book a pure delight.
The characters are all anthropomorphic animals, an approach that I’m usually skeptical of (since often it’s used to euphemize or allegorize queer identities in ways that feel strained), but it works wonderfully here, as the animals all act human enough to be easily relatable. Dada Henry, a wolf, has a grizzled, bristly face that gives him a just-out-of-bed look many parents with facial hair (and their partners) will recognize; Papa Milo, Lily, and Lena are all foxes, boisterous and playful; and Gwendolyn is a cockatoo—a clear nod, it seems, to families whose members don’t look alike (a fact that the family in this book seamlessly accepts).
Authors Bernadette Green and Daniel Gray-Barnett have each already given us terrifically funny picture books with LGBTQ representation (Who’s Your Real Mom? and Katerina Cruickshanks, respectively). Together, they’ve created another highly recommended tale that will likely be in heavy story time rotation for many families.
