Review of Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman

Newman, Leslea. Heather Has Two Mommies : Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York: Alyson Books, 2000.

Between the covers of this book, the emotions of a child without a traditional family are captured. Heather is a preschool aged girl whose favorite number is two. She has two arms, two dogs and also two moms. Her moms, Kate and Jane lead regular lives, being a doctor and a carpenter, respectively. This family goes on walks to the park and enjoys eating gingersnap cookies with milk. On Heather’s first day of play group she is nervous at first but then gets excited to see all the activities that she can engage in. She enjoys painting and building towers out of blocks. After naptime their teacher reads them a story about a boy’s father who is a veterinarian. When the others kids in the class start talking about their fathers, Heather feels left out. She begins to cry, but then her teacher assures her that she is not the only one without a father. The other kids in the class begin talking about their non-traditional families, including divorce, single parents and adoption.

In Heather Has Two Mommies the text tells the whole story. The illustrations are black and white and only modestly supplement the text. The pictures do show that some of the children in the classroom are multi-racial along with having non-traditional families. For example, David has dark skin and was adopted.

While the story focuses on Heather and her two moms, it also illustrates other non-traditional families. Stacy and Joshua both have two daddies, one through divorce and the other is gay. Miriam only has a mom and David was adopted. While it is wonderful that these are shown, this is not typical of most classrooms across the nation. This would not be culturally accurate, but it still helps to prove a point that there are multiple different styles of families. No stereotypical themes are used in this book.

At the end of the book there is an afterword written by the author to parents and teachers. Newman says that the idea from the book came from running into a woman and her partner who recently “welcomed a child into their home” (Newman, afterword 1). Being an insider to his group, she knew there were not many books published with LGBTQ themes and decided to write one herself. She wanted to “create a book that would help children with lesbian mothers feel good about themselves and their family” (Newman, afterword 2).