The 2008 Cybil nominees are here! Never heard of them? They bill themselves as “the premier Web awards for children’s literature,” and since they’ve been around for three years now, they have some claim to the title. The books are nominated by the public, and a panel of literary bloggers chooses the finalists. Several LGBT-themed […]
Here’s my next recommendation for a book about non-traditional (or non-specific), but not necessarily LGBT families. (See my philosophy behind this as well as my first recommendation here.) Mommy, Do You Love Me?, by Jeanne Willis and illustrated by Jan Fearnley (Candlewick Press, 2008), tackles the same broad theme as the publisher’s classic Guess How
The number of children’s books featuring LGBT families is sadly low, and the number of quality ones even lower. I think the only new one in the picture book category this year was Uncle Bobby’s Wedding. This needs to change, and we need to do whatever we can to encourage both independent publishers and large
A reader just wrote to ask me if I knew of any LGBT-inclusive children’s books in Spanish, especially for the very youngest tots. She knew of Antonio’s Card/La Tarjeta de Antonio, by Rigoberto Gonzalez and Cecilia Alvarez, but felt that was a little beyond the age of her own child. I’ll add the bilingual English/Spanish
The Grossmont Union High School District in California voted 4-0 yesterday in support of Proposition 8, the November ballot initiative that would ban marriage of same-sex couples in California. It is believed to be the first public school board in the state to do so. The San Diego Union-Tribune notes that some supporters of the
Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, the children’s book about a young guinea pig named Chloe and her uncle who marries his boyfriend, has received its first challenge. A patron at Douglas County Libraries in Colorado asked that the book either be removed from the shelves, placed in a special area, or labeled “some material may be inappropriate
Few among us, I’d wager, haven’t read Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd’s classic bedtime story Goodnight Moon. It was our son’s constant goodnight story for the first year or so of his life, and is now burned into my brain along with the Thomas the Tank Engine theme song, the movie Cars, and large
(Originally published in Bay Windows, February 22, 2007.) One of the ways I judge a children’s book is by how much it captures my son’s imagination. After we read The Different Dragon, he made me run around the house with a blanket over my head, flapping it like dragon’s wings, while he pretended to be
