Review: My Two Grannies by Floella Benjamin, illustrated by Margaret Chamberlain

When Alvina’s parents suddenly decide to go on a week's holiday, her Trinidadian Granny Vero and English Granny Rose squabble constantly over who will babysit. It falls to Alvina to take charge so she can spend time with both of her wonderful grannies, learning lots about her dual heritage along the way.

This wonderful feel-good story, from national treasure Floella Benjamin, was first published way back in 2007. Having noticed a lack of texts featuring mixed-heritage children, Benjamin was inspired to write My Two Grannies for her real-life Trinidadian-English daughter Alvina. As a result, her first-hand experience as part of a dual-heritage family—and understanding of family dynamics—comes through strongly in the story and gives it great warmth and authenticity.

In a lighthearted way, she addresses some of the challenges that often occur for mixed-heritage families: conflict and tension between relatives from different ethnic backgrounds, the importance of ensuring cultural traditions and perspectives of both sides are valued and, most important of all, the ongoing need to nurture your mixed-heritage child’s sense of identity.  

Although the story is a tad exposition-heavy and Margaret Chamberlain’s sketches of Trinidadian foods and traditions could have been more clearly defined, it’s a useful resource for PSHE at KS1. Children will learn ways to resolve conflict, the importance of turn-taking and will acquire more understanding of cultural differences. Bear in mind that if you’re looking for a book that explores differences in skin colour, this topic is not addressed explicitly in this book.

If it fits your whole-school plans and is appropriate for your class, you could also use the text as a geography stimulus, for example, to introduce a Trinidadian beach habitat as a contrasting locality to your school environment.

At home, children might be inspired to find out more about their own family history and cultural traditions and they could carry out research to create their family tree.

Overall, it’s a positive picture book celebrating unconditional love, differences in cultural traditions, compromise, and understanding. These are important themes not only for mixed-heritage children, but for all children, and adults, alike. 

Guide for teachers and parents

Genre	Narrative: stories with familiar settings
Child-led interests	family trees
Age group (EYFS, KS1, KS2)	KS1 (Y2)
Curriculum links/topics (EYFS/NC)	English (Y2): Reading comprehension – listening to discussing and expressing views about a wide range of contemporary… stories at a level beyond that at which they can read independently; discussing and clarifying the meanings of words, linking new meanings to known vocabulary; drawing on what they already know or on background information and vocabulary provided by the teacher; answering and asking questions; participate in discussion about books…taking turns and listening to what others say Geography: Place knowledge – understand geographical similarities and differences through studying the human and physical geography of a small area of the UK, and of a small area in a contrasting non-European country; Skills – use world maps, atlases and globes to identify the United Kingdom and its countries, as well as the countries, continents and oceans studied at this key stage PSHE: resolving conflict; turn-taking; celebrating different cultures
Suitability	whole-class reading, storytime, class and school library, home-reader
General features	third-person narration; past tense; dialogue (speech marks and speech bubbles); time connectives

All the Black children's books that I review are checked against my Jericho Benchmark.