Me and My Family Tree

by Joan Sweeney, Emma Trithart (Illustrator)

Overview

Where am I on my family tree? A beloved bestseller that shows children how to understand their place among their relatives, now refreshed with new art from Emma Trithart.


Who is part of your family? How are they related to you? 

In this edition of Me and My Family Tree, with new art by Emma Trithart, a young girl uses simple language, her own childlike drawings, and diagrams to explain how the members of her family are related to each other and to her. Clear, colorful, detailed artwork and a fill-in family tree in the back help make the parts of the family--from siblings to grandparents to cousins--understandable to very young readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781524768508
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	09/18/2018
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	32
File size:	17 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	3 - 7 Years

About the Author

Joan Sweeney grew up in Toledo, Ohio. She used to spend Saturday mornings taking free art classes at the Toledo Museum of Art. She has three "grown-up" children and five grandchildren. She wrote many more books after she first wrote Me on the Map. Joan Sweeney died in March 2017.

Emma Trithart grew up in Michigan, only moving to pursue a degree in illustration from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In 2014, after many wonderful years in Minnesota, Emma waved goodbye to the snow and drove across the country to Los Angeles, where she lives today.

Editorial Reviews

This very simple introduction to family trees follows a little girl as she draws pictures of her family, arranges them on a tree, and explains their relationships to one another. One aunt is part of an interracial family, and a grandfather is in a wheelchair. The illustrations are clear and colorful, and the final page has a sample family tree for readers to use or copy.
— The Horn Book Guide

Maeve Visser Knoth

2018-05-28
A reillustrated version of Sweeney's text (first published in 1999) about a three-generation family tree.Readers looking for a book that presents broad information about genealogy or family history will be disappointed with this title, which depicts a little girl making a family tree that includes her brother, parents, two sets of grandparents, and aunts, uncles, and cousins. It doesn't progress further back into more distant generations and includes only living family members. In the earlier version, the protagonist appeared white, but here she seems to be biracial, with a man of color as her father and a light-skinned woman as her mother in the illustrations. The older version had a white aunt and uncle on both sides of the family each married to a person of color, with biracial children, but here the protagonist's family is the only one that appears to be interracial. Closing text asserts that "everyone in the world has a family tree" and shows pictures of diverse families set against a map of the world, including some that could be read as families led by two moms or two dads as well as a single parent and a grandparent. This nod to diversity of family composition is welcome, but it seems like an afterthought rather than an integral part of the book, and it does not address adoption or other more-complex family constellations. Three of Sweeney's other titles have been similarly reillustrated and slightly updated: Me and My Amazing Body (illustrated by Edward Miller); Me and My Place in Space (illustrated by Christine Gore); and Me on the Map (illustrated by Qin Leng).A slight introduction to a big topic. (Picture book. 3-5)

Kirkus Reviews