Two Mommies

The New Republic reviews “Heather Has Two Mommies,” one of the first books aimed at young children to tackle the taboo of depicting same-sex partners as parents. “When I opened the new twentieth anniversary edition of Heather Has Two Mommies, I could not suppress a gasp. The original black and white illustrations are now in full color! This deceptively simple percept marks a two-decades-long saga of social change: when Heather first saw the light of day, it had been rejected by over fifty publishers, was eventually printed through donations, and the four thousand dollars that were raised proved insufficient to produce a colored picture book. Yet the story, simple in format, was passionate and brave: two women, one a doctor, the other a carpenter, fall in love and decide to bring a child into the world and raise her together. Beyond the addition of color, the new Heather has been otherwise altered or, I should say, expurgated. Eight crucial pages are missing—a cut that goes back, in fact, to the book’s tenth anniversary edition. Disappointingly, these pages have not been re-instated—but they are the very core of the narrative, emotionally, aesthetically, and politically.”