GENRE: **Diverse, SEL, Adoption
WORDS: 577
Query:
Dear Agents and Editors,
For your consideration, I’m pleased to share MAPLE’S MIRROR FAMILY (577 words, PB, ages 4-8), which confronts the emotional contradictions of transracial adoption by moving one generation beyond the typical adoptee protagonist and highlighting the experiences of an adoptee’s child.
When painful comments leave Maple wondering if the grandmother who looks nothing like her is family, she discovers a magical mirror that connects her with Mirror Grandma—the biological grandmother who’s the spitting image of her and her Korean adoptee mom. But as Maple soon discovers, belonging takes many forms, and she must reconcile the joy of reunion alongside the loss that’s ever-present for adoptees and their families.
Similar to the pride and longing in Eyes that Weave the World’s Wonders (Ho/Kleinrock, 2024), and featuring the celebration of unique family structures in A Family Like Ours (Lee/Murphy, 2023), MAPLE’S MIRROR FAMILY presents an emerging narrative of adoption, and offers emotional space for the children of adoptees to integrate their parents’ histories into their own evolving identities.
Beyond penning picture books, I’m a San Francisco-based writer at work on a memoir about the search for my own Korean family (and my identity along the way). I’ve also written a blog since 2008, which now publishes on Substack, and have built a community with 10k+ followers on Instagram. To keep the lights on, I work as a graphic designer and digital marketing consultant in a boutique studio I founded more than a decade ago.
Thank you for your time spent with this story! As a unique addition to the picture book market, I am open to editorial ideas for revision, and look forward to hearing from you.
Excerpt:
Every summer, when the trees turned lush and leafy, Gigi came to visit Maple.
Their days were filled with magic.
But not everyone understood what Gigi meant to Maple.
DING DONG!
“I can’t come today, remember?” said Maple when she saw her friends, “Gigi is here.”
“Where?”
“That’s your grandmother?”
“She doesn’t look anything like you!”
Maple looked at Gigi and felt the whole world spin.
What inspired you to write this story & what do you have in common with it:
As an adoptee, I often wondered what my natal family looked like, and especially wished for more “mirrors” to provide a sense of racial identity in my life. Fast forward: When my young daughter noticed that her grandmother—my American/adoptive mom—didn’t look like her, I sought books that could address our unique family dynamic. Unable to find any picture books featuring an adoptee’s child (let alone any that tackle the topic of genetic mirroring), I wrote MAPLE for her and the hundreds of thousands of families who are navigating the impacts of transracial/intercountry adoption, one generation on.
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