By Jane Cowen-Fletcher
The one where a little boy rides on his mama's lap all day long, because her wheelchair is a zooming machine.
A small boy climbs onto his mama's lap and they go. That's the whole book, and it is plenty. Her wheelchair is his zooming machine, and every page it turns into something else: he's a jockey and she's a racehorse thundering across the grass, he's a captain and she's a ship in a storm, then a race car, then an airplane with the wind in his face, then a train roaring into a tunnel. They zoom to the park. They zoom through the shops. They zoom home. And at bedtime the zooming stops and the last page says the truest thing in it: Mama is just my mama, and that's how I like her best.
Nobody in this book is sad about the wheelchair, and nobody explains it. It's a machine that makes his mother the fastest, most fun person he knows, and he loves it. That's the whole argument, made without one careful grown-up sentence. If your child has a parent who uses a wheelchair, this is one of the very few books that shows that parent the way a child actually sees her: not as someone who needs help, but as the one giving the ride. And if your child has never met anyone who uses a chair, they'll finish this thinking a wheelchair looks like fun, which is a much better place to start from than pity.