Lisa Westberg Peters.  Our Family Tree:  An Evolution Story.  Illustrated by Lauren Stringer.  Harcourt, 2003.  n.p.  Age 6 to 10.

[ Foremost, Happy Darwin Day.  Two hundred years is quite the milestone birthday. ]

My primary function as a parent is to raise my daughters to think for themselves.  I’ve long felt this way, and still I can think of no greater gift.  They’re still young, developmentally, to start the journey, but things got kicked into gear this month when my older daughter, not yet six, started talking to me about certain religious concepts like they were facts.  Uncool.  So I brought home Our Family Tree.

I’d have to call it a misfire.

Personally, I love the book.  It’s cohesive, unifying, and beautifully illustrated.  But for preschoolers, at least mine, we struggled with it.  I can think of three reasons why this was the case:

• The author referred to generations upon species of ancestors as “we.”  At nearly every page turn, the girls had to interject something along the lines of, “But not me.  I wasn’t like that.”  And I had to explain about things happening a long, long time ago, before any of us were born, etc.  Then we’d turn a page or two and have to reestablish the concept of ancestors.
• It doesn’t feel much more credible than any other creation story.  Maybe it doesn’t need credibility for our purposes—maybe diversity of opinion is what’s critical at this stage—but on the page that talks about the continents forming, the volcanoes look like they’re dancing.  Fantastic and weird.
• I felt like there was a lot of between-the-lines explaining to do, and realized that I am not the person to be doing it.  I am still unsure of how much of the book was factual, or rather how strong the underlying theories are.  So there I was, editorializing, and having no clue as to the accuracy of what I was saying.  That’s a dangerous situation.

Apparently, according to my spouse who has never once cited a source for me, saying that we are directly descended from apes is incorrect.  And while I’ve yet to verify that (why am I always the one doing the fact-checking?), perhaps this is not a good book for the specifics.