[written on 01/03/2003 and submitted to PolyChromatic.com's "Polyamory Related Books" section]
A poly children's book?!? When I saw it on the shelf, I had to buy it!
This is a translation from the Swedish original, which was an added bonus, as my wife and children are Swedish! The illustrations are wonderfully charming, and reveal all sorts of fascinating little details about Swedish life... such as the fact that doors in Sweden don't have knobs - they have handles! And bathroom doors have little hearts hung on them that are turned over when in use. Some crude attempts have been made to Americanize Swedish text in the illustrations, but they're minimally intrusive.
Else-Marie and Her Seven Little Daddies recounts the day the seven little daddies get drafted to pick Else-Marie up from play-group, thus inadvertently "outing" her. As she says, "...all my friends at playgroup have just one daddy. One big one." Oh my.
By making the daddies very little (half Else-Marie's size, or smaller) and focusing her concerns on the implications of that (visions of uncontrolled small dogs chasing them up a tree, or her playmates treating the daddies like dolls, run through Else-Marie's head as the day passes), the author cleverly puts the book into the realm of fantasy and creates a convenient proxy for the normal concerns and anxieties associated with having to "come out" as a child with an alternative family structure of any sort.
This is a wonderful book on its own merits, suitable for reading to any child, but of course, to poly parents (and generally to GLBT parents), who face the almost impossible task of locating literature that reflects their family structures (much less in a positive fashion without being overly self-conscious about it), this book is a godsend. The matter of fact way in which the daddies go about their daily activities emphasizes how little difference the presence of seven daddies actually makes in Else-Marie's day to day life, while the obvious differences are dealt with in a humourous and lighthearted fashion.
Pija Lindenbaum re-inforces this message of normality with subtle touches, such as including a scene in which Else-Marie recounts how her daddies read her to sleep (one line per daddy, which makes stories hard to follow and usually leads to her falling asleep quite rapidly), and having a stick-figure self-portrait of Else-Marie with her seven little daddies hang on the wall above her bed. Else-Marie's daddies are normal middle class sales people, almost excessively so: they work in an office, wear glasses to read, relax with the paper after a hard days work, and the family vacations in Greece, where the daddies dress like stereotypical tourists: short pants, palm-print button-down short-sleeve shirts and dark glasses. Else-Marie's mom is a plain-looking middle-aged woman who has perhaps a bit of extra padding around the hips and bottom, and wears bathrobes and bikinis with equal aplomb (thus the author also scores a point for positive body image messaging as well). Nothing even slightly out of the range of normal behavior or activities occurs--aside from the daddies bouncing up and down on the bed and singing the "itsy bitsy spider" song, which understandbly leaves Else-Marie suitably mortified and convinced that her daddies are the weirdest men on earth (a sentiment all children are likely to share at one point or another).
Pija Lindenbaum (who wrote the text and illustrated the book) has created a wonderful and charming children's book that just happens to be the most non-threatening, incontrovertiably unobjectionable family and poly-friendly children's book imaginable. A must have for any "alternatively structured" family.
The book was published in 1991 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc. and though it appears to be out of print, used copies are readily available at the time of this writing on Amazon.com and other book sites.