On the telephone to her son, a mother promises the many ways she will come to rejoin him, traveling by hot air balloon, camel, cheetah, and shark.

Unlike the other Birthmothers in her utopian community, teenaged Claire forms an attachment to her baby, feeling a great loss when he is taken to the Nurturing Center to be adopted by a family unit.

When I change I change fast. The moon drags the whatever-it-is up from the earth and it goes through me with crazy wriggling impatience . . . I’m twisted, torn, churned, throttled—then rushed through a blind chicane into ludicrous power . . . A heel settles. A last canine hurries through. A shoulder blade pops. The woman is a werewolf.
 
The woman is Talulla Demetriou.
She’s grieving for her werewolf lover,...

A beloved and very sleepy little boy resists his mother's efforts to put him to bed.

When the world tips upside down, baby animals tumble out of bed, landing in the arms of different mothers.

A mother reassures her young son as he imagines all the things that might go wrong while trick-or-treating.

"Call Me Home has an epic scope in the tradition of Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves or Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and braids the stories of a family in three distinct voices: Amy, who leaves her Texas home at nineteen to start a new life witha man she barely knows, and her two children, Jackson and Lydia, who are rocked by their parents' abusive relationship. When Amy is forced to bargain for the safety of one child over the other, she...

Little Bear and Sal both go berrying with their mothers, but after sitting down to rest, they each end up following the other one's mother.

Lyrical text and illustrations of baby animals and their mothers show the love of a parent.

Three owl babies whose mother has gone out in the night try to stay calm while she is gone.