I'm Your Peanut Butter Big Brother Book

In this delightfully engaging picture book, our narrator, big brother, uses his boundless imagination to wonder what his new sibling will look like.

Baby brother or sister, will you look like me? I blend from semisweet dark Daddy chocolate bar and strawberry cream Mama’s milk.
My hair is soft crunchy billows of cotton candy.
I’m your peanut butter big-brother-to-be.

Selina Alko’s lyrical and jazz-like text, matched with the vibrant energy of her illustrations, perfectly captures the excitement of a new baby for an older sibling, while celebrating the genuine love of family.

Selina Alko is the illustrator of My Taxi Ride and My Subway Ride. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Sean Qualls, who is also an illustrator, and their two children.

Children's Literature

A young biracial boy wonders what his expected sibling will look like. He is a peanut butter blend of his "semisweet dark Daddy chocolate bar" and "strawberry cream Mama's milk." His musings about possible skin tones for the baby include pure black coal, coffee with lots of cream, a ginger brown cookie, and midnight licorice purple. The boy also speculates about the baby's preferences as it gets older. Will the child like to leap and bounce, wind down the slide, dig holes in the beach, or make sand castles? His thoughts about hair return to mostly food images—string beans, broccoli flowerets, mushroom bobs, feathers round a coconut face, and sharp blades of grass sticking straight up. Other considerations include eyes and lip shapes. Baby sister arrives on the last page with peanut butter coloring similar to the boy's. The colorful pictures depict a loving family with a black father and a very pregnant white mother. The back flap explains that Alko created this book based on her own speculations when she was expecting her two children. Reviewer: Phyllis Kennemer, Ph.D.