YOU'RE STILL PRETTY NEW HERE

This inclusive, warm welcome to new babies invites readers to help make our world safer and greener.

“Hello there. You must be new here,” reads opening text directly addressing an infant with dark-brown hair and eyes and light-brown skin. The following pages depict diverse parents to whom this child might belong, including a snuggly interracial straight couple, a brown-skinned single mother whose doctor shows her IVF images, and two men of color signing adoption paperwork. From here, words and pictures go back through generations and then into prehistoric times to depict all the hard work, learning, growth, and change that “had to happen just exactly right” for this baby to enter the world. People in varied family constellations appear throughout Foster’s soft-hued illustrations, with visual details providing additional layers of diversity and experience through time: a woman leaking breastmilk through her Victorian-era dress, another woman in a sari struggling to wrap her infant, a baby with a cochlear implant, and a man sporting a bracelet with trans pride colors. It all comes together for a poignant and strikingly original work that doesn’t merely welcome babies—it truly embraces them. The culminating emphasis on environmental stewardship is conveyed through depictions of solar panels, windmills, a recycling truck, people bicycling, and endangered species in the wild, with the moving message, “And if we keep learning together…we’ll have a lot to look forward to.”

Something truly fresh for the new-baby shelf.