I'm your peanut butter big brother

With a black father and a white mother, a young boy wonders what his new sibling will look like when it is born. All of his conjectures evoke food imagery – “Baby, what shade will you be? Pure coal black or coffee with lots and lots of cream? Ginger cookie brown or midnight licorice purple?”

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My favorite is the two-page spread that wonders: “Baby, will your hair look like mine? Noel’s string beans locked this way and that or Akira’s puffy head of broccoli flowerets? Maybe, like Aunty Angela, your mushroom bob will wave neatly in half-moon curls. Feathers might hang from a round coconut face. Or, like Grandma Helen, will sharp blades of grass stick straight up?” The illustrations are absolutely adorable and quite well executed – a very fun mix of gouache and mixed-media. Many of them show friends or family members in order to put images to the boy’s guesses. I could see myself paging through this book over and over again to revel in the diverse and imaginative illustrations.

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