Review: My Mei Mei by Ed Young.

Ed Young is both Chinese born and an American adoptive parent of Chinese children. He's got stacks of Caldecotts.

This book tells the story of how Antonia, his daughter, got her little sister in China. It's a true story, as near as I can tell. We were sort of hoping to sling this story at Daughter to help ease toddler detente into more cordial sibling relations. This might work for some families - it's a pretty honest look at siblinghood, told in the simplest possible terms, with some pretty interesting pictures (I think the illustrations are done with pencils and pastels, somewhere between photorealistic portraits and impressionism, vaguely reminiscent of those mid-1970s illustrations you see in, like, child-rearing manuals and how-to-tie-dye books).

But for our family, there was no epiphanic moment of "Oh, so this baby brother creature might have some uses after all!" The story got, umm, I think three bedtime reads, which is about average for a library book. (A bell hooks story in the same batch was the real winner.) There may be some long-lasting, "Oh, so that's how this family works!" realizations clicking away in the background. The story almost seems designed to be explained, so if you're one of those parents who likes telling the story of how your kid came to this country, or if you simply have one of those kids who likes asking questions about China and plane trips and hotel rooms and how the process works, then you might get a *lot* of mileage out of this book.

Me, I'm actually more curious about the children's biography of Tenzing Norgay (the Sherpa who summited Everest with Edmund Hillary) that Ed Young illustrated. But I'm like that.

We may wind up checking this book out again in a couple of months, too - Daughter has started asking more of those "how did I?" questions. Is it because we read this book to her a couple of weeks ago? Possibly, but I don't really know.

My Mei Mei is available here, at adoptionshop.com.