Our Subway Baby is an adorable story! Peter Mercurio tells the story how he and his partner literally found and adopted a baby and within months became parents. One day, Mercurio’s partner, Danny, was in the subway and noticed what looked like a doll wrapped up in a corner. And when he got closer, he noticed that it was not a doll but a baby. The police, foster care and a one sympathetic judge later, a baby makes a Papa Pete and Daddy Danny. That is despite their house being too small, the piggy bank empty and the worries Mercurio had.
While I would have liked to have known more about Danny ACE Doe (the nurses named him after Danny and the subway where he was found) during his “growing up” years, Mercurio’s picture book is a perfect story of how a family is made. Some are biological, some adopted, and some are altogether different, but with love, they are all perfect. It might have been a bumpy ride to a loving home, but that journey is tenderly told. The full circle of finding the baby they named Kevin (after a special friend of theirs) is completed the day they bring him home: on the same subway he was found in.
The story itself moves probably as quickly than the actual events, but it is not rushed. The actual history of from subway to home (from finding Kevin, to the day Danny said yes to the judge asking if he would adopt the baby (despite Pete not being there), to the two of them saying yes at a family court hearing) about three months passed. And a handful of days before Christmas they became a family.
The photographs afterwards and the wrap-up at the end (it talks about, among other things, how Kevin wanted his parents to be married by the judge that finalized his adoption) are the perfect additions, like Kevin was to his family. And Leo Espinosa’s wonderful illustrations tie everything together. They are as sweet, soft, and adorable as the tone of the book and that baby was.