My Strange Shrinking Parents

Reviewed by Kate Prendergast

Review Source: Roaring Stories Bookshop
Book Author: Zeno Sworder

2021 CBCA winner Zeno Sworder on his new book My Strange Shrinking Parents

Zeno Sworder’s new picture book began in darkness, when the rest of the world was asleep. It was built, slowly, gradually, in between the padding of one pair of feet and the weight of two bodies down a corridor. Both tired. One, the tiny one, who was painfully aflame. The other there to comfort.

It began and it grew with love.

“When my oldest daughter was one or two,” Sworder tells me, “she would have trouble sleeping at night, because of her eczema. She would wake up maybe 2am or 3am, and I would walk her up and down the length of our house. We live in an old Victorian townhouse which is like a long dark cave. I set up a notepad and pen at one end of the house, and every time I did a lap I’d spend thirty seconds to write another sentence.”

An unusual way to write a story. But, in some ways, totally fitting to My Strange Shrinking Parents. From these nocturnal circuits of care emerged an exquisite, fantastical and dreamlike allegory about the sacrifices parents make for their children — migrant parents in particular. The second following Sworder’s This Small Blue Dot (which won the 2021 Children’s Book Council of Australia Award for New Illustrator), the book centres an Asian immigrant family, with the two parents literally shrinking in size as they make themselves smaller so that their son can flourish in what is often a avaricious, uncaring place. Continue reading on Roaring Stories Bookshop.

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My Strange Shrinking Parents by Zeno Sworder
Published by National Geographic Books on January 10, 2023
Genres: Immigration and Emigration
Pages: 40
Reading Level: Grade K, Grades 1-2
ISBN: 9781760762957
Review Source: Independent

Publisher's Synopsis: From the author of the award-winning picture book This Small Blue Dot comes a new tale of a family that doesn’t look like all the others, carrying an enduring message of the transformative power of love, and the shape a life can take.

It goes without saying that all children believe their parents to be strange. Mine were unusual for a different reason . . .

One boy’s parents travel from far-off lands to improve their son’s life. But what happens next is unexpected. What does it mean when your parents are different? What shape does love take? And what happens when your parents sacrifice a part of themselves for you?

In this heartbreaking and heartwarming story, Zeno Sworder reflects on his own migrant parents’ sacrifices to create a universal story about what it means to give to those you love. Drawing from the sacrifices his Chinese mother made to raise her young family in a small country town, Sworder’s drawings are full of beautiful detail and fairytale settings that explore his own journey from child to parent.

With humor and pathos, Sworder reflects on the strange nature of giving and receiving love and celebrates those parents who embrace a hard life for themselves in the hope of a better life for their children. Full of depth and generosity as well as insight and candor, Sworder brings this gorgeous fable to life.