One for the kids...

Not all of us have children old enough or young enough to appreciate story books. But for those of you who do have story-book-aged children and those of you who love a good yarn with pictures yourself, I thought I would post the occasional review of books for kids, with a particular focus on those written for kids of GLBT parents.


ABC A Family Alphabet Book by Bobbie Combs covers the ABC of everyday family events from playing baseball (it is American) to eating ice-cream, playing at the park and going to sleep. With colourful and humorous illustrations by Desiree Keane and Brian Rappa (great surname), the book features families with two mums and two dads of all different sizes, shapes and colours. My son is not quite old enough to do much more than stare at the pictures and suck the edge of the pages, but by all accounts the book tastes good as well. Published by Two Lives Publishing (2001) the book is easily available for purchase online and at a number of queer bookshops across Australia.

Incidentally, if you are interested in books for children a great place to start is a site I came across called BookDads. BookDads is run by two dads who started the site to help other fathers find books which portray positive images of fathers. The ‘about us’ section of the site says: “We all know it’s a mom’s world out there. Our son has two dads, so when he first joined our family we were concerned that he wouldn’t have enough women in his life. Instead, we found ourselves surrounded by women … Suddenly, we were dads in a mom’s world … [More] often than not, we found ourselves reading books to our son that always talked about moms but rarely mentioned dads. BookDads grew out of our search for books to share with our son that emphasized fathers and the importance of fatherhood in children’s lives."

If anyone has books or reviews they would like to share, feel free to drop me a line.

Jen