Else-Marie and Her Seven Little Daddies

I am a psychologist and have used this book on more than one occasion in my office. Its offbeat enough and funny enough to allow for broad application with children. Children often find themselves feeling different and reacting negatively to that. This is a great way to open conversation about feelings with children. I, too, wish this book would be published again!

This is a delightful, enjoyable book for any young child. I enjoy reading it to my two girls, ages 9 and 5. It is especially valuable for anyone with an unusual family configuration of any sort. Else-Marie has seven little daddies (they are identical, much smaller than Else-Marie, and very straight-laced, 1950s, brief-case carrying, suit-wearing dads!). She is very worried when her mother mentions that she cannot pick her up from after-care today, and that her dads will pick her up instead (they all live together). Else-Marie is worried that the teacher will accidentally sit on them, that the other kids will think they are strange, about all the things that might go wrong. After all, all kids worry when there is a change in plans! But in the end, her dads have much to contribute to the class, and Else-Marie is much relieved. The text is great, the illustrations wonderful. You'll want this one on your bookshelf.

Sometimes a picture book is so bizarre, so entirely out of left-field, and so wacked-out mesmerizingly baffling that the average adult reader has no choice but to fall head over heels in love with it. Such, I tell you, is the case with, "Else-Marie and Her Seven Little Daddies". I stumbled across this book entirely by chance. My library has a rather overwhelming amount of picture books and many of these end up in a kind of Overflow of No Return. I decided to take it upon myself to inspect and sort out this overflow and was doing a pretty darn good job of it when this book fell into my lap. At first I couldn't quite wrap my head around the cover, the title, and the concept. Then, as I flipped through and found it full of early 1990s Swedish day-to-day life (albeit with THE most Freudian conceit ever to grace a picture book's pages) I found myself reading it again and again and again. Completely forgotten and utterly wonderful, I harbor the strange secret hope that perhaps someday someone somewhere will take it upon themselves to republish this little nugget of children's literature gold. Amazing doesn't even begin to describe it. Else-Marie has seven little daddies. Most people have one big one. She has seven small ones. It's not so bad usually. Like all the other kids she knows, she waits for them to come home at the end of the day. They usually like to play a game with her in the evening, though sometimes they'll share a single paper between themselves. Today, however, things are different. Else-Marie's mother has informed her daughter that she won't be able to pick her up from work today. Can you guess who will? Thaaat's right! Her seven fathers. Suddenly the girl is aware that her family situation might seem a bit odd to the other kids. She has nightmarish visions of her daddies getting run up a tree by a dog, accidentally sat on by the teacher, or played with as dolls by the other kids. Of course, when the time actually comes it turns out that Else-Marie had nothing to worry about. Her daddies are the hit of her class. They tell stories no one else as heard and think that the birdhouse their daughter has constructed is top notch. In the end, Else-Marie learns to respect her non-traditional family and sums up this acceptance quite simply: "I wouldn't trade my seven little daddies - not for all the daddies in the world". WOW! It's a little painful to read a book when your jaw is hanging somewhere in the vicinity of your midriff, but I think I managed it. How do I even begin to parse this? First of all, let's just make one thing bloody clear. Some people are going to be like me. They'll find the book amusing, creative, and mind-blowing. Others will be like the School Library Journal reviewer who said of the book, "All through the story readers will search for a logical explanation, some missing puzzle piece regarding Else-Marie's bizarre situation. However, no answers are provided, no hints are given. This lack