Adopting

Dear Annie,

The images of storms you posted as Hurricane Sandy was battering us all were quite evocative.  The New York experience has been so awful.  I'm glad you came through unscathed, although disrupted.

As promised, I've been digging for books about biracial adoptions, and about adopting kids older than babies.  I haven't found a lot, but here are some offerings.

Starting with the ever-chipper Todd Parr: 

We Belong Together: A Book About Adoption and Families. It opens:

We belong together because ...
you needed a home
and I had one to share.
Now we are a family.

The illustrations for that page appear to be a single-mom family living with grandma and grandpa.  Parr offers a wide variety of kinds of families -- single parents, gay parents, straight parents, and even a two-page spread about dog adoption ("We all needed someone to play catch with"). *  His people come in a wide variety of skin colors, most of them not found in nature (see illustrations to right and left).

A cheerful, loving not very explanatory introduction to adoption for little ones.

Then there's Beginnings: How Families Come to Be by Virginia Kroll (out of print: link is Alibris).  It starts with dark-haired probably Hispanic parents telling their genetic-offspring son about his birth.  Each chapter is the story of a different child, told as a child-parent conversation.  There's a Korean adoption, an uncle adopting his nephew after his single-mom sister dies, two private adoptions (single white mom adopting white kid, black couple adopting black baby).  Then there's Nicole, a maybe-Hispanic girl in a wheelchair -- five or six years old -- being adopted by a mostly-blond white family:

"You had three sons.  Now me."

Nicole

"I kept thinking how beautifully black braids went with blond buzz cuts as I looked at all my children.  Pretty soon your brown eyes hooked into your brothers' blue, and you all began bickering over whose ice cream cone was biggest and whose singing voice was best, as brothers and sisters do."

Nina BonitaKane-Miller, part of the Usborne publishing house, has a Brazilian book, by Ana Maria Machado which is a fable-ish storybook about race and mixed families.  A white rabbit meets a black girl at the beach (feels so Brazilian already!) and asks how he can have fur as beautifully dark as her skin.  She spins yarns at him -- painted herself with ink, drank too much coffee, etc. -- which he methodically tries, to no avail.  Then he gets the concept of born-that-way, finds himself a dark spouse, and has children of many hues.  It's a while since I've read this one, but it does have a whimsically celebratory feel to it.

And finally, for your friends who are adopting a 1 1/2 year-old Ethiopian girl: I can find no African adoption books. Just Add One Chinese Sisterby Patricia McMahon and Conor Clarke McCarthy is the story of a family going to China and bringing home a daughter who appears to be two or a little younger.  The mother is telling the story to Claire, the daughter, when she's a little older, but on every page there's a sidebar with commentary the brother wrote as events unfolded.  Son and parents are embarking on this new event together.  Before they head to China, there's a baby shower.  Conor comments: "I think this new sister now has more clothing than I do.  And more toys than I had."  It's bemused, not resentful.  Conor ends up being the first family member to inspire laughter in his shy sister.  And when they're met at the airport by well-wishing friends, Conor is the one she holds on to.

Happy day-after your birthday, by the way.

Love,

Deborah

* I found a book that included a dog!  Do I get the bonus points?

Amazon wars

Dear Annie,

Wow -- both your girls are moving right along on the reading front.  And having a good time doing it.

We also loved the Golly Sisters and their distinctly juvenile form of sibling bickering.  There are three Golly Sisters books, two of them now sadly out of print.  In Hooray for the Golly Sisters,  May-May and Rose encounter a river separating them from a town where they're scheduled to perform that evening.  The opening lines provided us with another of those family literary references:

"Big river," said May-May.

"Very big river," said Rose.

It comes in handy when faced with any large body of water.

Some interesting developments are afoot this week in the world of bookselling.  You eloquently discussed some of Amazon's predatory practices back before Christmas.  Now they're putting the squeeze on some book publishers to cut the prices at which they sell to Amazon.  Last week, Amazon stopped selling e-books from Independent Publishers Group because it refused to cave to Amazon's demands.  "It wasn't reasonable.   There's only so far we can go," said the head of IPG, a distributor which sells books for hundreds of small publishers.  Our store gets many titles, including the wonderful Alfie books and Dogger by Shirley Hughes, from IPG.

Amazon-free

On Monday, Education Development Corporation, which publishes Usborne and Kane-Miller books in the U.S., announced it will no longer sell its 1,500 titles through Amazon.  They're an all-kids' book publisher -- we've talked about the Usborne activity books here and their First Experience series here.  Their publications which are nearest to my heart, though, are Atinuke's amazing Anna Hibiscus books.  Those come through Kane-Miller, which specializes in kids' books from around the world.  EDC started experimenting with going Amazon-less back in 2009 when it pulled its Kane-Miller titles -- at last I know why Anna Hibiscus was only intermittently showing up on Amazon.  They satisfied themselves that they could stay profitable -- Kane-Miller's sales are way up since then -- so they pulled the plug on the larger Usborne list this week.  The EDC president said Amazon is trying to "gain control of publishing and other industries by making it impossible for other retailers to compete effectively." And he concluded the announcement with a statement which has cheered many independent booksellers:

 From my point of view as an editor and publisher, this is also about supporting the connection between booksellers and book buyers. Hand selling has always been a necessary, integral part of the business, particularly with children's books. And it's still the hand selling, the independent booksellers and word of mouth that can create a best seller. Amazon might sell them, but independent booksellers are the ones who create them.

This is all cheering because from my point of view Amazon has seemed so unstoppable in its efforts to monopolize book sales in all forms.  Smart people are figuring out how to keep bookselling a varied and open marketplace.

Love,

Deborah