THE STORY ABOUT ME

Here’s a story that most children love to hear over and over: snuggled together in a cozy chair, a grandma tells her granddaughter once again about how much of a fuss everyone in the family made while waiting for her to be born. Stephenson depicts a cast of open-faced, beaming parents and relatives painting and furnishing the bedroom, phoning each other with updates, bringing gifts—and then gathering from all over the country to cluster around the newborn’s crib: “They came by bus, they came by train, they came by plane, they came by car . . . just to see you.” When the young listener leadingly asks why everyone loved her so much, Grandma replies, “Why? I don’t know. That’s just the way it is with families.” Occupying a middle ground between Robie Harris’s almost clinical Happy Birth Day (1996) and Debra Frasier’s abstract On the Day You Were Born (1991), this offers one version of a universal experience in tones of unalloyed joy. (Picture book. 5-8)