BEFORE I WAS YOUR MOTHER

A delicious tale with loads of girl appeal is satisfying for mothers and daughters (and brothers) alike. A dark-haired, freckle-faced mom tells her blonde daughter how, before she was her mother, she had a best friend named Ruby, a dog named Eileen, and a mom who could suspend fruit in Jell-O. She and Ruby loved to make noise, singing while they skated down the sidewalk, or tap-dancing on garbage can lids. And she loved shoes, even wearing her favorite cowboy boots to cousin Sylvia’s wedding. “I wasn’t always your mother,” letting her eat frosting roses off her birthday cake. When Mom was a girl, she told her brother that flowers were for girls so that she could eat the frosting roses off his birthday cake. She named her doll and her teddy bear and her velvet seal Katie, but now, “I am your mother, and you are my only Katie.” Pham (Which Hat Is That?, 2002, etc.), whose rich, homey watercolors are as gemütlich as could be, has done wonderful things with the faces. Readers can see that honey-haired Katie closely resembles her golden-haired grandmother, and that all three generations have the same wide, bowed mouth. Mom-as-a-kid wears braids, as does her best friend Ruby, who is black, and the contrasts and likenesses between those two girls are adorable. Love, comfort, and joy spill from these pages in sweet waves. It will no doubt inspire lots of similar stories in its readers. (Picture book. 4-8)