By Laurene Krasny Brown, Marc Brown
A guide-book, not a story. Cartoon dinosaurs explain what divorce means, define words like custody, and walk through what usually comes next, in short sentences a young child can follow.
It's the odd one out on any shelf, and it helps to know that going in. There's no plot and no character to follow. It's built like a guide, with headings: what the divorce words mean, why parents divorce, living with one parent, visiting the other, having two homes, holidays, telling your friends, meeting a parent's new friends, stepparents, stepsiblings. Under each heading Marc Brown draws small dinosaur families doing that very thing, with speech bubbles, and the text states the plain fact in a few short sentences. It defines custody. It says out loud that the divorce isn't your child's fault and can't be fixed by being good. It's been in print since 1986, was a New York Times Notable Book, and a great many families have been handed it by someone trying to help.
It tells a child the whole thing, plainly. The parts the picture-book stories leave out, why this happened, what a custody arrangement is, what a stepparent is, what to say to friends at school, are here in writing, with a cartoon beside each one, in words a five-year-old can take in. Some children have been piecing together scraps of overheard grown-up talk into something scarier than the facts, and for them, seeing it all laid out flatly can come as a real relief. The guide format itself carries a quiet message: this is a known thing that happens to families, common enough to have a manual. And the dinosaurs do a job too. They put a little distance between your child and the subject, so the family coming apart on the page never quite looks like your own.