Double Trouble for Anna Hibiscus!
by Atinuke; illus. by Lauren Tobia
Preschool, Primary   Kane Miller   40 pp.
9/15   978-1-61067-367-9   $14.99

The latest Anna Hibiscus picture book (Splash, Anna Hibiscus!, rev. 11/13) set “in Africa. Amazing Africa” relates Anna’s adjustment to the arrival of twin baby brothers, referred to as “Double Trouble.” Title-page art shows Anna wearing an ambivalent look on her face as she snuggles with her pregnant mother. The story then follows her struggles with the family’s necessarily diverted attentions immediately after the births. Mama is sleeping. Uncle Bizi Sunday is making food for Mama. Grandmother is resting after “helping [the] brothers to be born.” The aunties are rocking the babies. The other uncles are busy making things for the babies. No one can attend to Anna Hibiscus in the ways they usually do—at least not right away. “You will have to share us with your brothers, Anna,” Papa tells her; and as he lovingly carries her back into the heart of the family compound, everyone calls out offers of food and companionship, requests for her help, and words of affection. Anna’s sense of security now bolstered, she approaches the crying babies to comfort them. A cuddle with Mama, and then with Papa and the twins, too, closes the story with a scene of familial bliss, which has pictorially abounded right from the beginning in Tobias’s sunny-side-up illustrations. While there’s no shortage of new-baby books, it’s refreshing to see one about the arrival of twins, not to mention one featuring an interracial, extended family in a non-Western (albeit nonspecific African) setting.

From the September/October 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.