Toto
by Hyewon Yum
Hyewon Yum specializes in illustrating uplifting picture books centered on brave young girls who discover their strength--in a big swimming pool (Saturday Is Swimming Day), within their small bodies (Not Little), and so on. In that triumphant vein, Yum has written Toto, in which a little girl comes to terms with a prominent birthmark that preoccupies her without defining her.
"Sometimes I wonder," begins the girl, who goes unnamed, "how I would look without Toto," as she calls the bubble-gum-pink birthmark on her forehead. She has never really minded the mark--her cousin Charlie thinks it means she has a superpower--but she's nervous about it in the run-up to the first day of school because "sometimes people only see Toto, not me." Her mother gives her a hairstyle that largely hides Toto, and at school the girl immediately finds a bosom buddy who has no idea of Toto's existence... until the girl hangs upside down from the monkey bars, gravity tugs at her bangs, and her secret is revealed. Now what?
Yum's watercolor-and-pencil art is invitingly roomy and subdued: it's all browns and grays except for the girl's birthmark and the occasional burst of pale pink--the color of her face, say, when she's embarrassed by Toto. And sharp-eyed readers will note that Toto is on proud, pink view in photos of the girl scattered around her home. Toto is an it's-okay-to-be-different book that leaves room for realistically mixed feelings about standing apart. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author
Discover: This it's-okay-to-be-different picture book, centered on a little girl with a prominent birthmark on her forehead, leaves room for realistically mixed feelings about standing apart.
