King and King

Title: King & King

Author: Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland

Illustrator: Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland

Picture book for ages (approximately) 8 and up

Rating: 5of 5 stars

Summary:

This book tells a story about a prince looking for his perfect match and finds it in another prince.

Opinion:

I find the story told in this book to be nice, it has a good plot and a storyline similar to many traditional fairy tales. The way it ends is untraditional, but I find it sad that it is also considered controversial. People in our society are homosexual. It happens and that’s the way it is. I see no need to isolate that population by only having stories and books with heterosexual characters. It would be the same as all books and stories having only Caucasian characters or only Christian characters. How is it uncontroversial to have a Hispanic story but it is controversial somehow to have a homosexual couple in a story? No, they are not the majority but they are still a group of people and we shouldn’t pretend like they’re not there. Reading a book about a homosexual couple will not turn a child into a homosexual anymore than reading a book about birds will turn them into a bird, if that’s what people are afraid of. But reading a book like that will open their eyes to a different style of living and and will promote tolerance and acceptance, which we could all use a little more of. A little more acceptance in this world and maybe one day we won’t have to worry about bullying and harassment because different will be okay.

The illustrations in this book are fun and exciting. They used several different forms of art to create these wonderful illustrations including, collage, paint, stamps, watercolor, and ink. They are fun to look at and add that much more to the story. There are several illustrations that show things not stated in the text.

I would definitely use this book in my classroom, not only on my library shelf, but for all grades in genre studies and author studies as well. As I said before we wouldn’t keep a book about Latinos or Kwanza out of our classroom so why keep this book out. In schools especially, which are a particularly good breeding grounds for bullying and harassment, we need to promote not just tolerance but acceptance. Kids need to be able to come to school and feel safe and accepted for who they are and books like this can help.