Throughout June, GeekMom will be celebrating Pride Month with lots of LGBTQ content. Follow the Pride Month tag to find all the content in one space and keep checking back for more throughout the month. Today’s book review is Who’s Your Real Mom? by Bernadette Green with illustrations by Anna Zobel.
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Who’s Your Real Mom? is a picture book about two young children, Elvi and her friend Nicholas who has come over to play. Elvi has two moms and Nicholas wants to know which one is her “real” mom. Elvi has many answers for him. The one “wearing jeans” – but they both are! The one “who can do a handstand on one finger” – no one can do that! The one who “crochets hammocks for polar bears” – do polar bears even know how to use hammocks?
Eventually, Nicholas gets annoyed and so Elvi starts to give less outlandish answers. Her “real mom” holds her when she’s scared and kisses her goodnight. Of course, both her moms do those things and so Nicholas begins to understand what Elvi has known from the beginning, that both her moms are her “real” mom.
This is a sweet little picture book with watercolor illustrations primarily in tones of yellow and orange that give it a cozy, homey feel – although it did make it feel a little old-fashioned too. The subject matter is a situation many parents may come across if their child befriends another with same-sex parents and the book does a fantastic job of explaining how the concept of a “real mom” isn’t really accurate to the reality of those families without over-complicating the information for young readers.
One more great element of this story is that Elvi is a mixed-race child who has one mom with a darker skin tone than her and one with a lighter skin tone than her own. This adds an extra layer of diversity to the characters and avoids only showing white LGBTQ people as so much media does. There’s also a lot of humor here as Elvi invents increasingly elaborate stories to tell Nicholas about her real mom, and this keeps the book from becoming overly worthy.
I would recommend Who’s Your Real Mom? To any parent with young children and it will be an ideal addition to any library or book collection accessed by young children.
GeekMom received a copy of this book for review purposes.
