By Jamie Lee Curtis
An adopted girl makes her parents tell her the story of her own arrival again, and corrects them when they skip a part, because it is her story and she knows every word.
A girl climbs onto the bed and starts the ritual: tell me again. Tell me again how you couldn't grow a baby in your tummy. Tell me again about the woman who was growing me, who was too young to take care of any baby at all. Tell me again how the phone rang in the middle of the night and you screamed. Tell me again about the plane with no movie, only peanuts. Tell me again how you glared at anyone who sneezed near me. Her parents tell it, and she pushes them on to the next bit, because she already knows it by heart. Laura Cornell's pictures are a riot of small jokes going on around the edges, so a story that could have been solemn is full of laughing grandparents and a father who cannot work a diaper. It ends where it started, with the girl and the story she owns.
Almost every adoption picture book is spoken by the grown-ups. This one is spoken by the child, and the grown-ups are the ones being made to perform on request. That flip matters. An adopted child is often handed their own beginning as a gift from someone else; here the girl demands it, interrupts it, owns it, and it is plainly hers. The comedy in Cornell's pictures does the rest of the work, because a family that can be silly about the airport and the diapers is a family where this story is ordinary and safe to ask about. It is also one of the few books at this age that says out loud that there was another woman, and that she was too young, and then keeps going without flinching.