We Belong Together: A Book about Adoption and Families
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In a kid-friendly, accessible way, this book explores the ways that people can choose to come together to make a family. It's about sharing your home and sharing your heart to make a family that belongs together.Children's LiteratureHaving done a book about mommys, daddys, and grandparents of each gender, Todd Parr addresses families that have chosen each other through adoption. The text is very simple and affirmative about how the parents wanted to share all the love and resources they could offer to the child reading the book. The illustrations are done in a schematic style, reminiscent of a child's drawing. The colors are extremely vibrant and the blue, yellow, green, and purple faces make it clear that adoptions are color-blind. The text is highly patterned. Most spreads begin "We belong together because " and then identify a child's need and the adoptive family's ability to meet that need. Thus one of the last spreads says, "You needed someone to say I love you' and we had love to give." While it might be included in a classroom collection, this book is best suited to being used by parents with a quite young adopted child; ideally, any given page would open up discussion about what brought the individual family together; however, some of these discussions might go well beyond the determined positive tone of the book. For example, it is not easy to explain to a child why the birth mother was not able to answer the need for love.
