A Mother for Choco

Keiko Kasza

You know, I think if adults spent more of their time reading kids' books, the world would be a better place. (Good kids' books, of course.) They're blissfully short, so you get a quick rush of accomplishment for finishing one in five or ten minutes. A well-illustrated kids' book will soothe jangled nerves and calm the reader down simply by being so cute that one can't help chilling out a bit. And, let's face it-- if adults need to be hit in the face with messages the way so many adult books seem to believe they do, then most adults are probably better off with easy readers anyway. So, folks, I'm proposing a new book club for the 18-and-over set, and we're all going to read brightly-illustrated picture books. And our first selection is Keiko Kasza's amusing, ded-of-teh-kyoot A Mother for Choco.

Choco, unexpectedly, is not brown. He's actually very, very yellow, with stripy blue feet, wings, and beak, and is a bird. (A chickadee, most likely, given the name, but is drawn in that kind of generic-bird way.) Once the chocoholics have gotten over their momentary disappointment, we'll continue.

Choco seems to have lost his mother. He wanders around, looking for animals who resemble him in one way or other, taking a kind of blind-men-and-the-elephant approach to trying to find his mother, and is unsuccessful. A bear offers to cheer up the depressed Choco, and the stage is set for the happy ending one suspects is coming.

So, why are we reading it for the book club? Because the message here, while pretty far out in the open, is still much more subtle than one finds in many books today. I hope there are some writers in the book club, because a large number of them could take some lessons from this book. (It's not fair to pick on specific writers, so I edited out everything previously in these parentheses.) I mean, you get the whole "resemblance does not a parent make" vibe, right? It shines right through in those wonderfully cute illustrations. And yet, some authors (and not only adult authors) would think that you, reader, are too stupid to get it, and would add a couple of sentences that spell out the thesis for you. Yes, even in a book aimed at the kindergarten set (cf. John McCutcheon's Happy Adoption Day!, which handles the same subject in what may be the clunkiest possible way).

But I'm also suggesting it for the reasons I mentioned back at the beginning of what has turned into a review that's far longer than the book itself: because it's terminally cute. How can you look at this silly little bird and not smile? Stress reduction, that's the goal here. A Mother for Choco delivers on that level, too.