By Claire Masurel
A small boy named Alex has two homes, and the whole book is a calm walk around both of them, counting the two of everything.
Alex has a home with Mommy and a home with Daddy. That arrives on the first spread, and the book never explains it, defends it, or apologizes for it. What it does instead is count. Two bedrooms. Two beds. Two front doors. At Mommy's there's a soft chair; at Daddy's there's a rocking chair. There are friends to play with at both houses and toys at both houses. Alex bakes gingerbread men at one and shucks peas on the step at the other, takes baths, plays dress-up, does the ordinary business of being four years old, twice. Kady MacDonald Denton's watercolors are loose and warm and full of afternoon. The only thing the book insists on is the line it comes back to: Alex is loved in both places, by both parents, all the time.
The counting is the entire design, and it's cleverer than it looks. A child of three or four cannot hold a grown-up explanation of why a family changed shape, and doesn't want one. What they can hold is furniture. Two beds is a fact small enough to carry around. So the book hands over the concrete, checkable things, where you sleep, where your chair is, who's there, and lets the reassurance ride underneath the inventory instead of being announced. Claire Masurel wrote it after talking to a child who was sad about her parents' divorce, and the choice she made was to count what the child still had rather than what was gone. The text is short enough for a bedtime that's already gone long.