Picture Book

“We live with a bear!” a boy insists. The bear that sleeps in the bedroom next to his is loud, bossy, and strong.

“In my family, when the sun goes down, our hair goes up!”

Kaia is happy to tell her friends everything her beekeeper dad has taught her about bees and how important they are, talking as if she’s a beekeeper, too.

Mónica is from Bolivia. Her best friend, Hannah, is from Israel. Both miss things about their homelands.

Ernestine can’t wait to go on her first camping trip, with her Aunt Jackie and cousin, Samantha.

“… summer is green. Green on green on green. Summer is a green song.” It’s a song of leaves, trees, weeds, and grass that can “sound like music”…

A young girl describes how water is viewed among her people. “Water is the first medicine, Nokomis told me . . . We come from water … The river’s rhythm runs through my veins. Runs through my people’s veins.”

An old truck is the one constant on a small family farm occupied by a Black family whose only child grows from toddlerhood to girlhood, through her teenage years and into adulthood.

“In the first morning light, all is quiet. Or is it? Listen. What sound is morning?”

This fresh, warm, funny account about members of a newly configured household learning to get along revolves around two dogs (one small, one large) and a cat.