Customer Reviews

A Koala for Katie (Albert Whitman Concept Paperbacks)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My 3-yr old adopted daughter really likes this book. It is a good story and well written. The part where Katie becomes motherly toward the stuffed koala is very age appropriate for the 3-4 year olds.

Here's another of our son's adoption favorites. Like Katie, he wondered where babies come from, and why he came to his parents differently than most. He identifies strongly with Katie, whose trip to the zoo let him, early on, explore the adoption theme. He pulled this book from those I intended to review, exclaiming, "OOOOOOO! I love this book!"

The zoo will find a new mother for a baby koala that suddenly lost its own. Katie's parents compare this to the way that an adoption agency found parents for her when her birth parents could not care for her. Katie's parents buy her a stuffed koala, which she adopts to act out her concerns.

This is simply a great book for any child who was adopted, as well as for his siblings.

---Alyssa A. Lappen

I agree with some of the other reviews in regards to the whole "real mommy" wording. This is something that has recently come up with our 6 yr old daughter. She wanted to know why her real mommy couldn't keep her. It's very important that these children understand that we are their "real" mom and dad's. That the mother that gave birth to them loved them and loves them very much, but that we are their mom's and dad's now and will always be. To me I just didn't love the wording. The illustration was great. Yet the story just didn't do it for me, or for our daughter.

"A Koala for Katie" has been great for our daghter. . .we bought it when she was three. In it Katie wants to be reassured about why her "real" mother didn't want her and finds comfort in "adopting" a stuffed Koala at the zoo and role-playing as the Koala's mother. My daughter enjoys role-playing, so this is right up her alley.

I will say, however, that in trying to keep with "proper" terminology, I didn't care for the author's us of the term "real mother" when Katie asks her mom why her "real mother" didn't want her. I actually went through and use white-out and changed it to "birth mother" for the sake of consistency, especially since our daughter is at the age where she's trying to distinguish between "real", "birth" and who I am, and I am her "real" mother. That would be our only complaint about this book.