You Made Me a Mother

Sala debuts with an ode to motherhood adapted from text she wrote for a video ad for a baby carrier company. The book retains much of the casual, lightly irreverent language of the source material (“I felt you,” it begins. “You were a pea. Then a lemon. Then an eggplant”), though comments about parenting’s more frustrating moments have been softened slightly. In her customarily breezy ink-and-watercolor artwork, Fancy Nancy illustrator Glasser focuses on the relationship between one mother and child—a willowy blond woman and her son—which sharpens the visual narrative as the boy grows into an active, independent child, but also feels at odds with the universality of the text. Ages 4–8. [em]Author’s agent: Kelly Sonnack, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Illustrator’s agent: Faith Hamlin, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. (Mar.) [/em]