Rating: 
Summary: A Beautiful, Powerful Book!
Review: The book arrived yesterday and last night my nearly 6 year old daughter, adopted from China at age 15 months, and I read it. In the past, I've tried to have a dialogue about how she feels about her birth family and the lack of information on them. She has always replied that she never thinks or wonders about them and is not sad that she knows nothing of them. I knew this was not true, but I did not know how to get her to verbalize her feelings.While reading this wonderfully simple but amazing book, she told me she misses her birth mother and is sad that she does not know her. Two-thirds of the way through the book she said "I have a great idea!" She closed the book and said "Let's go look for the moon." In pajamas we went outside to look for the moon, but it was too cloudy to see it. I felt terrible, however, the book and the idea of the moon was so powerful for her that my daughter suggested we imagine we COULD see the moon... Tonight we will look again to see if we can see the moon. If not, we will again imagine we can see it and continue to talk. I thank Carrie for giving me a tool to open this section of my child's heart.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for the little ones
Review: This book has beautiful illustrations and is thoughtful, but I won't read it to my six-year-old adopted daughter at this point. I wouldn't read this to any adopted child without reading it first, and I wouldn't read it to a child who has not yet had several spontaneous conversations with you about his/her birth parents. I think this book oversimplifies what the adopted child's view of her birthparents will be or ought to be. I believe it to be presumptuous with respect to the child's feelings about her birth parents--I don't think it goes without saying that a little child is going to feel love for her birth mother at the age of 5 or 7 or 8, and I think it is a mistake to send the message that such feelings are the normative goal to shoot for, which I think is one of the messages of this book. These are complicated matters, and it seems unlikely to me that LOVE would be the first truly authentic feeling that an adopted child would develop about her birth parents. Unfortunately, it is much more likely that the child will first feel confusion, shame, frustration, anger. And I think it is crucial that these children be encouraged to vocalize all of these feelings without sending them the message that what they SHOULD feel for these parents is love. I just think that telling an adopted child that he/she ought to love the parent that abandoned them is more likely to create feelings of shame or frustration. And unfortunately, once the child is old enough to reconcile feelings of abandonment with feelings of love, they are likely to be too old to enjoy this simple book.
Rating:
Summary: Essential
Review: This important and long-needed book supports and facilitates the telling of the child's adoption story with the young child's participation. Every adoption involves loss. The most profound loss for the child is the loss of the birth mother. The book guides the adoptive parent and the child to her presence, illuminating the birth mother in images, realizing her in words, bringing her into the light of their world. An essential gift to aid the life-long journey of understanding for both parent and child. Becky M.
Mom to two daughters from China
Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful book for adoptive children
Review: This is a beautiful book for parents to read to their adoptive children. The story helps create a comfortable setting for children to ask those difficult questions about their birth parents. The pictures are rich and detailed and say more than words can express. The first time I read it to myself I cried. As a mother of a daughter adopted from China, this book will make talking about her story much easier.
Rating: 
Summary: gentle adoption story for young children
Review: This is a lovely book for young adopted children who have little information about their birth family. Although the illustrations are all reproductions of Chinese peasant paintings (widely available elsewhere in the form of cards and calendars), the text is adaptable for any young child adopted from overseas. In recognizing the adopted child's natural curiosity about his or her birth mother, the book gently validates the adopted child's losses as well as celebrating the love and comfort of the child's adoptive family. Nonthreatening, positive, and warm, this book is a good addition to home and school libraries. The parents' guide, by Jane Brown, deserves five stars.
Rating:
Summary: Charming!
Review: This is another lovely book to read to adopted children, and not just to those from China. As with Rose Lewis' I love you Like Crazy Cakes, Carrie A. Kitze writes tenderly and lovingly of the process of adoption and the sadness for the far-away birthmother. The illustrations are captivating to both children and adults.
Gisela Gasper Fitzgerald, author of ADOPTION: An Open, Semi-Open or Closed Practice?
Rating:
Summary: Shining prose
Review: This lovely book for young adoptees uses simple yet powerful words that shine moonlight on a child's most poignant thoughts and wishes. It is a book that I read aloud to my daughter from China and I was grateful for the words it gave me to open a talk with my daughter about her own feelings. The book's illustrations are vivid and eye-catching and very colorful; there is a lot of expression in both the prose and the paintings of this little book.
Rating:
Summary: The moon is always there, even when it can't be seen...
Review: This powerful book designed for pre-teen children (adopted from China, other countries or domestically) begins with a poem about the Moon, the refrain of which is "please let the light that shines on me/shine on the one I love. The author uses the Chinese family festival of the Moon to anchor the illustrations to her text and subtext. This is to enable and empower the adopted child in building a link between her two worlds and families, with the Moon high above becoming the spiritual as well as physical "light that shines on me and the one I love". Many adoptive families find it hard to choose the right minute for showing their child that it is OK both to feel hurt by and yet still love their birth-family. The book achieves this both by the quality of the illustrations (showing how life IS in China at Moon time) and the easy richness of child-suited sparse but elastic text). Each one-liner of text carries with it questions - and a whole subset of questions which are ready to escape from the initial questions- that the child can ask. Parents and child can read together, read separately, it's of no matter. What matters is that the issue of love and honour of the past is brought into the safety of the adoptive family. For children the word "love" is means connection. The book allows this; and with this foundation the child can later go on to deal with ALL the other powerful emotions that come with losing birthfamily but gaining an adoptive one. In addition to the text of the book, if that were not enough richness, EMK press presents a free Parent Guide to download from their website. This guide is written by the formidable social worker and writer/presenter of children's therapeutic activities, Jane Brown. Here, Jane underscores from her professional experience the NEED for children to be permitted connections to their past while IN their present family: fail them in this, and the child doesn't grow "whole". I was personally overwhelmed by the wistful childishness of some of the text .... The child affirms the magic of the moon and wonders if her mother is "looking now?" I loved the positive that the child affirms her happiness in her new family and hopes her first family can sense that. I loved the Jinshan illustrations. This painting academy specialises in naïve art, so the illustrations are both friendly-foreign, and entirely apt in their childlike perspective, a myopically child-centric view of the world. Here I use myopic, or short-sighted, in the sense that the child is ultra-focused on the aspects of living that matter. I questioned whether the book would work for all kids, because some children, and I am adoptive mother to two such kids, don't have easy reactions to easy solutions for connections to loss. Was the book appealing to MY need for my children to be happy here, was I ignoring their need to know the harder facts of how they came to be abandoned? Was looking at the connection of love far too simplistic? So I handed it to "the experts". The book's been tugged-of-war over, it's begged for and they are up looking for the Moon when they should be asleep. My children (aged 3 and 7) took it to their hearts... I am not sure exactly why, but I suspect that my children KNOW books are special. So ,for them, to hear things in a book that make OK hard feelings is "Double Happiness". This is just one of those books that resounds and displays those essentials for children: symbols which elicit trust and peace in their quest for answers. And I love it too. The moon is always there, even when it can't be seen. As are my children's connection to their first families.
Rating:
Summary: Intended to help open a dialogue about family connections
Review: We See The Moon is an exotic picturebook written and drawn especially for adopted children and their families by Carrie A. Kitze. Intended to help open a dialogue about family connections, and the importance of keeping loved ones in one's heart, the distinctive and unusual color illustrations add a truly universal world theme to this absorbing picturebook which is enthusiastically recommended for personal, school, and community library collections.
Rating:
Summary: Profound
Review: Your adopted child can be from anywhere ... and you and your family will be able to relate deeply to this book's messages. The author uses simple language to elegantly express tender feelings of enduring curiosity and loss in adoption, even as it acknowledges the security of the adopted home. My 6-year-old was relieved to hear words describing how she felt. She seemed even more gratified as we read it together to know I was hearing how she feels and it is safe for us to talk about these topics. This book is amazing in the way it communicates the naturalness of feeling sadness, and offers a way to find comfort by connecting to birthparents through the moon, in words children can easily understand. Best of all, it reinforces an ability to love both sets of parents.
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