The word "parent" is not just a noun. It's also a verb.
We follow Evelyn, a young Canadian girl, as she begins Grade 5. Evelyn lives with her father, who crumbles his crackers into his tomato soup “as if he’s lazy and in a hurry at the same time” and her Scottish mother, who “never breaks her crackers” or is in a hurry. “She is on top of things.”
The story revolves around Jeremiah, who visits his Dad for the Summer. Dad, as it turns out, has a live-in boyfriend who is constantly trying to ingratiate himself into Jeremiah’s life. Jeremiah, as most kids who are going through new circumstances, is none-to-pleased. Add a cranky neighbor, a mom who lives miles away but calls routinely to check-in, and a new friend to the mix, for the makings of a summer with interesting and surprising plot twists. No, the biggest twist is not that Dad has a boyfriend. That’s established in the first couple of pages. More interesting things are in store. But this review, is spoiler free!
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Into every life, a little rain must fall. But, what if you are that rain? And nobody appreciates you? Sure, everybody likes sunshine. But let a rain cloud ruin your picnic, or flood your basement, or ruin your play date, and you are bound to be miffed. Such is the story of our hero, Rain Boy, a kid unlike any other.
The plot is a straight-forward one. A pencil, symbolic in that pencils are generally used to describe everything presented to the eyes, the heart and the mind, tells us the story of a crayon called Red. His name is Red, because he’s wrapped in a red wrapper. But, to anyone who can see beyond the wrappings, he’s a blue crayon with a red label.
A young girl posits that she should not have to choose between her two Fathers. She shouldn’t have to do so.
Are you happy? The question is innocent enough. My four-year-old who is running around the house with his plastic sword in case we get attacked by Princess Robots (year, don’t ask) stops dead in his tracks to ask me.
“But I didn’t know the first dad-gum thing about raising one,” says my dad, who still talks like that, Southernish, with a twinkle. For her part, my mom likes to tell the story of the maternity nurse at Touro Infirmary who—after my folks gathered their things and Mom settled into the wheelchair for the short discharge trip to the car—winked at my mother and grandmother, then turned to my startled dad and offered him the 21 tightly swaddled inches of his firstborn.
The other day at school, a classmate got angry at me and said ‘Clown!’ So begins our story and our entry into this black, white, grey and red world created by Andrés and Hernández, where a boy walks us through a few moments in his life and the impact his two dads have had on it.