After twenty-odd years of living in sin, Richard and I are getting married this weekend (the pic above is from the lovely surprise shower thrown for me today by the Horn Book ladies) and tomorrow is the start of the preparatory madness. Music: check; lights: check; suits: check; vows, food, rings, cake, cleaning: not so much. See you all next week!

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In other blog news there was a Twitter-tempest last night over a blogger’s review of Laurel Snyder’s completely amiable middle-grade novel Penny Dreadful. Book blogger Noël De Vries was loving the book until she came to a reference to lesbian moms which implied they were “normal.” De Vries wrote “The only problem is, being a lesbian is not normal. It’s not something that “just happens” to people, like being poor or brave. In fact, when you look through Biblical glasses, homosexuality is, well, an abomination.”

Ohhhh-kay. I suppose if you are looking at at homosexuality from a Biblical perspective (albeit a very particular fundamentalist one), De Vries’ assertion makes its own kind of sense, but she then veers into a decidedly irrational corollary: “Characters like Willa and Jenny [the moms] with their happy little family, show elementary-age readers that Christian beliefs are hateful and silly. Add these characters to the full-blown assault of politically-correct propaganda that is molding America’s children.” So if an author depicts characters whose behavior you label abhorrent, then he or she is making you out as the hateful one? Note to Noēl: not everything is about you, dear.

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Props to SLJ for getting this story out in the first place, but I have to note one thing that skeeved me out about the lede in the original article: “Don’t expect to see Lauren Myracle’s new book Luv Ya Bunches (Abrams/Amulet, 2009) at Scholastic school book fairs this year. It’s been censored—at least for now—due to its language and homosexual content.” Calling the presence in a children’s book of a couple of lesbian mothers “homosexual content” is gross unless the two of them are totally going at it.

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Two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo court, build a nest, and raise their (adopted) daughter Tango. Highly anthropomorphized to maximize the sentimental but noteworthy lesson on family diversity, the story gains depth from the biological reality of same-sex penguin partnering. Gentle illustrations of the smiling penguin family add appeal, if not scientific accuracy, to this book based on a true story.

Tango is, for me, an example of a book that is didactic but On My Side, that is, a book that says something I think all children should hear. While you might think reviewers would go easy on a so-so book that speaks to their own values, I wonder if the opposite is true–that in order to combat even the suggestion of boosterism, we give them a harder time. But, as I recall, I couldn’t take the smiles.

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