CM Magazine: Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born.

________________ CM . . . . Volume V Number 17 . . . . April 23, 1999

Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born.

Jamie Lee Curtis. Illustrated by Laura Cornell.
Markham, ON: Scholastic Canada, 1998.
29 pp., pbk., $6.99.
ISBN 0-590-03839-7.

Subject Headings:
Adoption-Fiction.
Babies-Fiction.

Preschool-grade 2 / Ages 3-7.
Review by Irene Gordon.

**** /4

inside picture As the title indicates, this picture book describes the night a little girl was born. It is a slightly different birth story, however, because she was adopted.

Tell me again how the phone rang in the middle of the night and they told you I was born....Tell me again how you got on an airplane with my baby bag and flew to get me....Tell me again how you couldn't grow a baby in your tummy, so another woman who was too young to take care of me was growing me and she would be my birth mother, and you would adopt me and be my parents.

The story successfully combines the factual (as in the excerpt above), the humorous, and the sentimental (as in the following):

Tell me again about the first time you held me in your arms and called me your baby sweet. Tell me again how you cried happy tears.

The colourful, very detailed illustrations add much humour to the story, humour that would appeal to young children but with touches for adult readers. For instance, scattered around the parents' bed are books with such titles as "Soccer at Three Months," "Is Your Child Lawyer Material?," "101 Quizzes for Toddlers," "Slim Thighs in 30 Days," "So Your Baby's Home...Now What?," and "Crying : An Analysis."

Highly Recommended.

Irene Gordon of Headingley, MB, is a free-lance writer and former teacher-librarian who spent 14 years working in a junior high school library.

To comment on this title or this review, send mail to cm@umanitoba.ca.

Published by
The Manitoba Library Association
ISSN 1201-9364

TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR THIS ISSUE - APRIL 23, 1999.