A Mother for Choco (Paperstar) | Keiko Kasza

A Mother for Choco (Paperstar) | Keiko Kasza | A wonderful and fabulous book!

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A Mother for Choco...

	A Mother for Choco (Paperstar) Keiko Kasza Putnam Juvenile, 1996 - 32 pages average customer review:based on 70 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

We love this book!

This story is obviously (read the other reviews!) great for transracial families, either by adoption or marriage, and because it really doesn't specifically talk about adoption or adopting as an infant, I think it would be great for children who do look like their families, as a way to talk about loving all different kinds of people. It's a great way to start conversations like "Can you love someone who doesn't look like you? What if they look or talk 'funny'?" It would be good for talking about people with disabilities, the elderly - someone doesn't have to look just like us to be lovable. I recommend this book for all families.

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A wonderful and fabulous book!

This has been my son's favorite book for over 5 years now, and was my daughter's favorite before that! Children don't have to look like their mother to be part of a loving family. My children do not look like me at all, but that doesn't make me less of a mother to them! God created our family through love, not genetics, and watching Choco search for his mother reafirms that a mother does not have to give birth to a child in order to love & parent them!

A Mother for Choco is read almost every night in our home! Mrs. Bear makes apple pie for all her children, none of whom look like her, and as coincidence would have it, my son's favorite pie is apple! Although I buy my apple pie at the grocery store, my son loves me anyway! :-)

A truly loving and touching story. A book that any child would love to have read to them over, and over, and over again!

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A Mother for Choco

I think this is an excellent book for young children. I have a 21/2 year old little boy and this book is a great tool for introducing adoption.

A wonderful adoption book for the very young

You just can't go wrong with this book! The text is perfect for youn children, and the illustrations are precious.

Goat's Stress Reduction and Pie-Eating Clinic, Meeting Number One.

Keiko Kasza, A Mother for Choco (Putnam, 1992)

You know, I think if adults spent more of their time reading kids' books, the world would be a better place. (Good kids' books, of course.) They're blissfully short, so you get a quick rush of accomplishment for finishing one in five or ten minutes. A well-illustrated kids' book will soothe jangled nerves and calm the reader down simply by being so cute that one can't help chilling out a bit. And, let's face it-- if adults need to be hit in the face with messages the way so many adult books seem to believe they do, then most adults are probably better off with easy readers anyway. So, folks, I'm proposing a new book club for the 18-and-over set, and we're all going to read brightly-illustrated picture books. And our first selection is Keiko Kasza's amusing, ded-of-teh-kyoot A Mother for Choco.

Choco, unexpectedly, is not brown. He's actually very, very yellow, with stripy blue feet, wings, and beak, and is a bird. (A chickadee, most likely, given the name, but is drawn in that kind of generic-bird way.) Once the chocoholics have gotten over their momentary disappointment, we'll continue.

Choco seems to have lost his mother. He wanders around, looking for animals who resemble him in one way or other, taking a kind of blind-men-and-the-elephant approach to trying to find his mother, and is unsuccessful. A bear offers to cheer up the depressed Choco, and the stage is set for the happy ending one suspects is coming.

So, why are we reading it for the book club? Because the message here, while pretty far out in the open, is still much more subtle than one finds in many books today. I hope there are some writers in the book club, because a large number of them could take some lessons from this book. (It's not fair to pick on specific writers, so I edited out everything previously in these parentheses.) I mean, you get the whole "resemblance does not a parent make" vibe, right? It shines right through in those wonderfully cute illustrations. And yet, some authors (and not only adult authors) would think that you, reader, are too stupid to get it, and would add a couple of sentences that spell out the thesis for you. Yes, even in a book aimed at the kindergarten set (cf. John McCutcheon's Happy Adoption Day!, which handles the same subject in what may be the clunkiest possible way).

But I'm also suggesting it for the reasons I mentioned back at the beginning of what has turned into a review that's far longer than the book itself: because it's terminally cute. How can you look at this silly little bird and not smile? Stress reduction, that's the goal here. A Mother for Choco delivers on that level, too. ****

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