GLBTQ collection: Mama Eat Ant, Yuck!

This book is a picture book designed for young children, keeping this fact in mind the audience will affect the measures I looked at in the book. To get right to the point this novel is the humorous tale of a family with two moms, one of whom happens to swallow an ant. The book is centered around the repeated phrase “ Mama eat ant, yuck!” which is a great tool to gain involvement from younger readers by asking them to help fill in the phrase with you. The illustrations are large and colorful and would be attractive to children as well, and I find them very age appropriate. The book is a good length of text making it versatile for a broader age group but not so much as to lose young readers who get bored during long explanations. I would defiantly recommend this as a fun story both to share in a classroom setting as well as at home for students.
Looking now more specifically at how this book functions as a piece of GLBTQ ( Gay, lesbian, bisexual,transgender, queer/questioning) literature as well as a piece of diverse literature in general, I feel there are specific issues to look at. The book introduces the family structure through both pictures and in the first sentences “The children call me Mama and my sweetheart is called Mommy.” This simple introduction helps to point out to young readers what might be a difference between the story and their own family but it does not spend too much time lingering or “teaching” about this. Since the book is aimed at very young readers it would be hard for them to stay interested if the book always paused to teach. Another perspective to this is that for children who have two mommies or daddies they do not always need this explained over and over, it’s reassuring in a way to just have a book that makes them part of the ever elusive “normal” that we see in books. As a general piece of diverse literature I felt the illustrator Matthew Daniele put a lot of effort into subtly breaking stereotypes and being inclusive to other races and often underrepresented groups. The illustrations feature a range of skin tones on the characters, a female truck driver bending the gender stereotype, and children in wheelchairs that are enjoying a game of basketball in the park. With very young children, whom are targeted in this book, simply including a diverse cast of characters helps open their eyes and minds to differences without losing them to only books that teach about one culture or group of people at a time. The only thing that I did notice is that the character we know as Mommy is pictured to be more masculine in the relationship and I do worry that this could purvey a stereotype that all same-sex couples will have a more masculine and more feminine role still. For that reason I feel this is only a small part of the lessons that books can help to teach children about families. When looking for a great book to share with a class of children that begins to expose them to diverse families I would defiantly recommend this work. I think the author and illustrator have taken care to make a great book for children.

Edmonds, Barbara. Mama Eat Aunt, Yuck!. Eugene, OR: Hundreth Munchy Publications, 2000.