By Pat Brisson
It's Sugar's birthday and her mother's too, the way it always has been, except this year Mama is in prison and the present is a book of their own stories.
Sugar and her mama share a birthday. They share a lot, actually, a whole stack of stories Mama used to tell her, hugs, the ordinary good times a girl keeps in her pocket. Then Mama went away and everything changed. Now Sugar lives at Grammy's, and they go see Mama when Grammy can manage the trip, which is not as often as Sugar would like. For the birthday that belongs to them both, Mama makes her something by hand: a book, filled with the very stories Sugar remembers her telling. Nobody says what Mama did. Nobody says how long she'll be there. The book isn't interested in that. It's interested in a girl and her mother finding the one thing that still passes freely between them.
Almost every picture book on this subject is about a dad. This one is for the child whose mother is the one away, and that child is used to not existing in books. It's also the book for a child being raised by a grandmother, with the long trip and the not-often-enough visits drawn honestly rather than tidied up. And it hands your child something usable: the stories a parent told you are still yours, they didn't go anywhere, and a person inside can still make something with their hands and send it out.