Mommy Laid An Egg

Title: Mommy Laid An Egg

Picture Book: Controversial
Author: Babette Cole
Age Level: 4-8
Rating: 2 out of 5

Summary
This book is about answering the question, where do babies come from?  The childrens parents give them crazy explanations but the children get a pencil and paper and draw out the actual answer to their question.

Opinion
I think that this book is a painless effort at trying to convey the details of conception and childbirth in a humorous manner and not-so-serious way to children but nontheless, I think that this book is too detailed for children the age this book is designed for.  The cartoon-illustrations provide a humorous edge to the serious talk with examples of babies coming out of tubes and greenhouses but I think they show things that are not appropriate for children.  Some of these things include different positions children can be concieved and could have been left out all together because this is something that is unnecessary for children to know.  The author was probably trying to add humor and try and make it less embarrassing but I think that it is more uncomfortable to read then anything.  Julie Wollman-Bonilla explains in her article that a text may be rejected as "inappropriate for children because it might frighten or corrupt them by introducing them to things they don’t or shouldn’t know about"(289).  In this case, I think that this is very true when reading through this book. 

Even though children need to learn about childbirth and conception, I do not think that this book represented this information in an appropriate way and would cause a lot of controversy if read within a classroom environment.  Most parents want to talk about this topic with their children first and reading this book to children in the classroom would cause a lot of problems, in my opinion.