Photo Credit: abrams books
Not surprisingly, the child narrator at the heart of Would I Trade My Parents wouldn’t. Trade his parents, that is. The Harry Potter-esque boy ruminates on the parents of his friends and their many good points—like making blueberry pancakes and allowing weeknight-television watching. Other selling points include some that take the adult reader back to the days when friends’ parents were glamorous for unaccountable reasons: the mother who did hair, the dentist with a convertible, even (gulp) the weekend dad.
Would I Trade is a book about the allure of the simple unfamiliarity of other people’s families, not about any particular dissatisfaction with one’s own. Like all of Laura Numeroff’s books, it speaks in the satisfying cadence of childhood and works well as a read-aloud, in addition to giving a young reader both words and pictures to pour over.
—KJ Dell'Antonia
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