Author: Scott Cramer
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Rating: WORTHY!
Ilustrated well by Jordan Novak.
Hey, this is my six-hundredth blog post in this blog!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!
This young-children's to middle-grade story is 36 pages long, and completely insane - probably the reason why I love it. It begins when Morley first truly realizes that having siblings means you have to share your mother's attention with other people.
The fact that Morley's mom and dad irresponsibly chose to have seven kids is a big part of the problem, but Morley doesn' seem to be able to learn the lesson that Mom would spend more time with him if he helped mom get her chores done. I'm not convinced that very many kids actually internalize that lesson!
Morely's solution to his problem is to go bounce on his bed and chant that he wants more mothers. When he falls off the bed not one, but two moms rush in to see if he's okay. Neither mom seems to think it's strange that the other mom is there.
Having two moms is awesome! They get their chores done twice as fast and so have more time to spend with the kids, but Morley soon decides that an additional mom would be better still. Even with three moms, Morley isn't satisfied, so he makes his bouncy wish again and again and before long the family has as many moms as it does children. Is this, at last, sufficient moms?
Perhaps you can guess the resolution to this tale. I'm not going to spoil it, but I admit I'm still laughing from the page where we're informed that the house has become so crowded that moms 4, 5, & 6 have to camp out in the back yard! For some reason that really struck me as hilarious because it was so pathetic. It really hit my funny bone. Or maybe my mummy bone.
This story is short and to the point. The illustrations by California artist Jordan Novak are beautiful, and the text is highly amusing. I would have liked to have seen a point made in there that the kids could have eased this situation by helping around the house. In this way they would get to spend time with mom as they help her, and ease her burden.
I read this on my phone and found it looked better in landscape mode than in portrait mode. On this topic, I'd like once again to make a point about not wasting trees by putting limited content on a page so that it's mostly white space. I do not know if this particular book is going to end up as a print book. In ebooks it's irrelevant, of course, but on the printed page we can all make a difference. I know that it's not always possible, given artistic needs (no one wants to see a page insanely larded with text and images), and recycled paper helps (although it's sadly rare to see print books available on recycled paper), but it would have been nice to have considered our trees, so those are my beefs with this story. Other than that, it's great!
