What happens when a mother and daughter team up to write? An award-winning book series is born.
The real-life Lovable Lucy poses with books she inspired.
Since their first book, “Little Lovable Lucy’s Big Day,” Roth and Penn have written two others and have a fourth in the works. The books have won multiple awards, including the Mom’s Choice Awards, Reader Views awards and the noted Kirkus Reviews Recommended Review award.
But their second book has been banned in Florida for featuring two men standing together beside a rainbow mailbox. Roth noted that the mailbox was what got it flagged.
“We also believe that diversity in any book, and especially in children’s books, matters,” Roth noted. “It really matters to the children, and you don’t really realize that until you start looking at a book from one perspective.
“… We’re really proud to reflect the communities that we live in in our stories, and the people that we met along the way, and they’re there also.”
The pair’s latest book – published in August – features a deaf character based on a childhood friend of Penn’s – and Lovable Lucy gets to meet the character’s service dog.
“Shayna was really committed to having a character in the book be deaf like her girlfriend, and I think it’s a good thing, because hearing-impaired people are all around us, and differently abled people are all around us, and I think that’s important for that to be reflected in children’s stories as well.”
