quarrels

I picked this book up after seeing it on the shelf because I was pretty sure I wasn't going to like it. I could tell that just from the spine! The list of Linda Girard's other works did not help any (Adoption is for Always, My Body is Private, Who is That Stranger and What Should I Do?, You Were Born on Your Very First Birthday, to name a few). And as it turns out...I was very right. This books was actually a little nauseating: the illustrations by Judith Friedman made me cringe ('lifelike' watercolors) and I felt like the writing was all over the place. The book tells a very relevant story that tries to console a very real void in many children's lives, what with the climbing divorce rate and all, but the voice she uses is so deliberately fragile and poetic that reading Katie's story becomes painful for the wrong reasons. Girard writes with the sentence structure and vocabulary of an adult but with the fluency of a small child which, to me, makes the whole thing condescending.
I will say, though, that the one thing Girard did really well was to create scenes that an adult could dissect with a child that allows them to explore their own emotions or try to understand Katie's.