By Suzanne Lang
A gallery of animal family portraits, hung in silly gold frames, that lands on one line a child never forgets: if you love each other, you are a family.
Picture a wall of framed portraits, and in each frame a different animal family posing for the painter. A lizard with two mommies. A puppy adopted by a family of cats. A tiny bird raised by his grandmother. Single parents, step-parents, big loud broods and quiet pairs, all of them in rhyming couplets, all of them mugging for the frame. The refrain rings like a little bell through the whole book and then closes it: it doesn't matter how your family looks or who is in it, if you love each other, you are a family. That's the entire, generous point.
Where some books about family difference feel like they're teaching a lesson, this one just throws a party. Because every family is an animal drawn to be a little ridiculous, a step-family or an adoptive family or a two-home family shows up as one more funny portrait on a happy wall, not as a special case that needs explaining. For a young child adjusting to a family that's grown or shifted, that ordinariness is the gift, and the single repeated definition, love makes a family, is small enough to actually hold on to.