My Mommy Hung the Moon: A Love Story

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Image of My Mommy Hung the Moon: A Love Story [Hardcover]
Release Date: 
July 10, 2010
Publisher/Imprint: 
HarperCollins Children
Pages: 
32
Reviewed by: 

This is the ninth collaboration between author Jamie Lee Curtis and illustrator Laura Cornell and it is perhaps the sweetest—but not so sweet as to give you a mouthful of cavities. Subtitled “A Love Story” it is a paean to a child’s love and admiration for a mother who seems like she can do anything and does do everything.

My Mommy Hung the Moon is told in rhyme, which works well sometimes: “She feathered the birds. She taught them to chirp./She taught me to speak, my cousin to burp.” And not so well at other times: “She zaps out the thunder and makes lightning glow,/then crayons for me a giant rainbow.”

Bumps in the meter aside, the mom in this book is amazingly capable in every sort of way a child could imagine. And the narrator in this book imagines some pretty outlandish feats for her mama. In fact, this mother is so capable, according to her child, that she will give ordinary supermoms an inferiority complex. Then again, the line “My mommy is nice. She never is mean” also makes her an alien in my book.

Laura Cornell’s watercolor and pen drawings are filled with lovely, telling details that enhance insight into the child’s world and mind. The labels for the objects pictured alone are worth reading—and rereading.

If you are looking for a fun, quasi-bedtime book that definitely does not resemble all those sickeningly sweet I Love You books flooding the market for years, then My Mommy Hung the Moon is for you.

Then again, if you are anything like most moms, you are going to have to create yet another to-do list just to shine again in your own child’s eyes.