By Mary Hoffman
Grace, from Amazing Grace, flies to Africa to meet the father who left and the new family he's made, sure her stepmother will be wicked like the ones in fairy tales, and finds out families are what you make them.
Grace loves stories, but the families in her storybooks always seem to come with two parents under one roof, and hers doesn't. She lives with her Ma and her Nana; her father moved to The Gambia, in West Africa, and started a whole new family there. Then a letter comes: her father wants her to visit. So Grace and Nana make the long trip, and Grace carries a suitcase full of worry, because everything she knows about stepmothers she learned from Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, and none of it is good. What she finds instead is a warm, ordinary, brand-new family, a stepmother named Jatou who is kind, a little brother and sister, and a father who is glad she came, and she comes home understanding that a family is something you build, not something you're handed.
Grace names the exact fear a lot of children carry into a step-family without ever having read a picture book about it: stepmothers are the villains, everybody knows that. By putting that fear in a beloved, brave heroine and then gently dismantling it, the book gives a worried child permission to be surprised by a kind stepparent. It also does something few blending-family books do, it sits honestly with the ache of a father who left and started over somewhere else, and lets Grace feel that and still find room for the new people. And it's a warm mirror for a Black child whose family stretches across two countries.