Customer Reviews

William Is My Brother

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This book is a factual, upbeat story about a family with two boys -- the older one is biological and the younger adopted. It focuses on them as brothers -- what they like and dislike about each other, and how normal and natural their "brotherhood" is. A good intro for mixed families (like ours) and it gets discussion going. Basic black and white drawings and a nice surprise ending.

Jane T. Schnitter, William Is My Brother (Perspectives Press, 1991)

Schnitter's simple children's book is a rare one: it's a book about adoption written from the perspective of the biological child in an adoptive family. While this would seem an obvious idea, I haven't been able to find any others that deal with adoption from this perspective, so it was a must. That said, I have to say I wasn't terribly impressed with it. The story is fine, though it reads a little kludgy; the artwork has some great concepts (I love the family dog), but it comes off as primitive, and not in the good way. I had actually thought this either a self- or vanity-published book until I looked up Perspectives Press on the internet. (That said, the book's afterword does strongly imply that William is My Brother was Perspective's first book, so the fact that it's now a legit publisher with a wide array of both children's and adult titles on alternative family groupings may not exclude the possibility that this is a self-pubbed effort.)

An important topic, and one on which, I hope, other, more well-crafted, titles have since appeared. I haven't found any yet, though. ***