More Champagne and Another Slice of Cake: Sarah Brannen's Uncle Bobby's Wedding Little Chloe's most favoritest person in the whole, wide, world is her Uncle Bobby. She loves to go for walks in the woods or at the seashore with him and spend her days with him. When Uncle Bobby announces that he and his friend Jamie are going to get married, Chloe should be happy for him, right? But she's not: she is soo-o-o-o sad. She's sad because she is afraid that her special times with Uncle Bobby are over, sad because she is afraid that when Bobby and Jamie have children of their own she will never see him any more. Oh, woe...
Uncle Bobby is wise, though, and so he and Jamie ask Chloe to be the flower girl at their wedding. Once she knows that she will be included in the big day and in the new couple's life, all is well. Chloe even becomes the hero of the wedding for finding the lost wedding rings! And, just as it should be, they all live happily ever after.
Uncle Bobby's Weddingis the first children's book published by Massachusetts author and illustrator Sarah Brannen. She has plenty of experience with the characters, though, having been the owner of several guinea pigs including the originals of Chloe and Uncle Bobby. Her characters - Bobby and Jamie plus all of Chloe's family - are delightful little furry-faced, bewhiskered guinea pigs clad in human clothes. It's dresses for girls, jackets for boys (they dress sort of like Donald Duck).
Brannen's illustrations for Uncle Bobby's Wedding are mostly exterior scenes in woods and along river banks, highly detailed and quite charming. The wedding reception, for instance, takes place in a meadow; where Brannen has drawn party-goers dancing to a steel drum band while a gaggle of children play tag among the adults. The text is written at a level appropriate for ages pre-school through grade two or so; with few if any unfamiliar words and one or two sentences per page (about thirty pages).
Like most children's books, Uncle Bobby's Wedding is an eensy morality play. The intended lesson is that falling in love with someone else doesn't mean that your relatives will abandon the children in their lives - and that when they get married, you get new relatives. What could be better than that?
So... what's the problem... why was Uncle Bobby's Wedding sufficiently reviled to become one of the ten most challenged books of 2008? It's simple: Chloe's Uncle Bobby and Jamie are both wearing tuxes at the wedding, and it's not a wardrobe malfunction.
I had half-hoped that all those people challenged this book on the grounds of scientific inaccuracy, but alas! I found out that a sort of homosexual behavior is common among guinea pigs. Ergo, it wasn't bad science on Brannen's part. A little research turned up a website (I won't plug them by mentioning a name or URL) that said this book is "evil for glorifying same-sex 'marriage'." [sic] Yep, teaching children to love their uncles even if they're ho-muh-SECK-shu-als is evil. I have to wonder, whatever happened to "Hate the sin but love the sinner"?