By Becky Birtha
Not one child's story but a dozen of them, every kind of child with a parent locked up, so yours can find the page that's theirs.
Becky Birtha doesn't pick one child. She gives you a whole roomful, a page or two each, and they don't have the same problem. Lacey is frightened, with one of her two moms in jail. Rashid's mom is in for the second time. Juana has both parents inside, and she and her brothers and sisters got split across different foster homes. Yen has questions only her mother can answer, so she puts them in the mail. Rafael has to deal with other children asking things they shouldn't. Jermaine has a coach who shuts down the mocking on his team. Atian acts out until a teacher finally listens. Nobody's offense is named, and nobody is fixed. What the book does instead is show what helped, letters, one trusted grown-up, a visit, and it says plainly that anger and shame and missing someone all belong in the same chest at the same time.
The other books on this shelf hand your child one family and hope it's close enough. This one plays the odds and wins, because somewhere in these pages is a child in your child's exact spot, and the specificity is the whole medicine. A child with two moms. A child whose parent has gone in more than once. A child in foster care while both parents are away. A child getting asked nosy questions at school and not knowing what to say. Kastelic's art stays soft and unhurried, so the pages hold hard feelings without cranking them up. And because each child gets so little space, your child can look at the ones that aren't theirs and learn they're in company.