By Sandra Levins
A small boy is certain his parents divorced because he and his brother smeared chocolate pudding all over the wall, and he is completely serious.
The boy telling this has worked it out. He and his little brother got into the pudding and smeared it up the wall. Mom and Dad had a terrible fight. Not long after, Dad moved into a new place and the family was two families. Pudding, fight, divorce. To a five-year-old that is not a wild theory, it's a straight line, and he has been carrying it around ever since. The book takes his logic completely seriously before it takes it apart. He lives with his dad now and sees his mom on weekends, which is worth knowing going in, because it's one of very few picture books where the father is the one running the household, doing the laundry and the school run and burning the toast. Bryan Langdo's watercolors are loose and sunny and keep the whole thing at a child's eye level. Then his mom sits him down and tells him the truth, and the truth is short: grown-ups fight about grown-up things, this was never yours, and pudding cannot do this.
This is the one that shows a parent how a small child actually reasons, and it's worth the price for that alone. Your child does not think in terms of two adults growing apart. They think in terms of the last bad thing that happened before everything changed, and they connect the two, and then they don't tell you, because if it was their doing then saying it out loud makes it real. The pudding is a perfect stand-in: absurd enough that your child can see it isn't true, close enough to their own logic that they recognize the shape of it. So the book does something a straight reassurance can't. It doesn't just tell your child they're blameless, it shows them the mistake, from outside, on somebody else. Watching a boy be wrong about this is easier than being told you're wrong about it.