Tuesday Storytime: Adopted Families

Another super-specific storytime theme, just because I had the books to do it with.  I've read both A Mother for Choco and Little Miss Spider before, with different storytimes.


A Mother for Choco
Keiko Kasza
ISBN: 0399218416
Adorable, soft-edged anthropomorphic animal mothers, and a cute yellow and blue bird.

Choco is an adorable motherless bird, who is searching the world for his mother.  He finds various animals that look like him in different ways: Mrs. Giraffe is yellow like he is, Mrs. Walrus (grumpy!) has puffy cheeks like his, but all of them kindly point out their differences and demur - that is, until Choco sees Mrs. Bear.  He isn't even going to ask her - even he can tell she looks nothing like him, but she comforts him and asks him how a mother would act.  After meeting her other three children (spoiler alert: a pig, a hippo, and an alligator), Choco realizes that love and kindness are more important in a mother than physical appearance.  Cute and just on the edge of moralizing - a line Kasza walks very well.


We Belong Together: A Book About Adoption and Families
Todd Parr
ISBN: 978036016681
Faux-childish stick figures in vibrant nonrealistic primary colors illustrate various families.

I have to admit that I'm slightly ashamed of myself, because part of the reason I prefer this to Parr's other "family" book is that this one has all of the non-traditional family arrangements safely in the illustrations, not in the text.  I'm a wimp, I know, but I live in South Carolina.  One must pick battles and fight the long fight.  Besides, this book is delightful even so - the text is lovely.  There are pairs of pages - a child on one "You needed x" and people on the other "We had x to give" followed by a spread that unites them as a family with a simple statement of love.  Example: A page of a purple child with glasses, imagining a dog.  "We belong together because you needed a friend."  Facing page, an orange person with wild hair standing in front of an animal shelter with a similar dog in the window.  "and I knew where to find one."  Next spread, The two people playing catch with the previously imagined dog "We all needed someone to play catch with."  Simple, powerful, and true-hearted without being sappy.


Little Miss Spider
David Kirk
ISBN: 0439083893
Miss Spider's childhood is just as interesting as her adult life!

David Kirk's Miss Spider is one of the only spider books I can actually read and enjoy without any niggling phobia-related nerves or jumpy sensations.  She's cute and small and essentially two yellow dots with anime-eyes.  Here we learn about her childhood.  Born with her zillion brothers and sisters, Little Miss Spider is the only child who is interested in finding her mother - they all scatter, and she's left alone to search, but not for long, as Betty the Beetle comes by and offers to help the sad child.  The text is printed at a HUGE size, and the rhymes are short and simple, as the duo look for a missing mother.  A betrayal by a mean fat spider (why did it have to be fat, one wonders) means peril, but Betty comes to the rescue once again, and offers to be an interim mother.  A moral epilogue at the end is addressed directly to readers, advising them to look for mothers in the "creature that loves you best."