Review of the Day: The Muéganos by Jaque Jours

The Muéganos
By Jaque Jours
Transit Children’s Editions (an imprint of Transit Books)
ISBN: 9798893380873
$20.95
On shelves May 5, 2026

For an author/illustrator of picture books, is there any pleasure in the world quite as keen as working out the inherently nutso logistics of an already kooky premise? Let me tell you a little something about the picture book The Muéganos. Once in a great while, I fall deeply and inextricably in love with a title even before I’ve read the whole thing. Maybe it’s the premise of the story or the art or something a little more ineffable. Whatever it is, it doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does it’s like a lightning strike. And from the moment I cast my eyes upon the ridiculousness (but familiar ridiculousness) of this story, I was a goner. Best of all, you don’t have to already be in a family like The Muéganos to understand why this book is funny and true all at once. Written like a joke you tell only your closest friends (because you know they’ll “get it”) Jours adeptly takes an incredibly silly idea and manages to make it poignant and universal in one fell swoop. This is a story about breaking a family apart, but in the best way possible.

“They are never apart. They are so close that they are stuck as once.” Presented as a single line of five family members all adhered in a row, the Muéganos (named after those sticky desserts of pull-apart dough) really do everything together. Sleep, eat, watch TV, you name it. “Julie thinks it is a little boring.” Hanging off the far end, she’s constantly taken to places without the agency to explore what she wants and is interested in. Still, she loves being with her family. The great change that’s bound to happen comes on a day when the family is visiting a museum. With an almighty “CRACK!” Julia breaks off from her family unit. But when she starts to explore her own hobbies and activities, she is able to see that she can be both a member of the Muéganos family and her own person all at once.

Set in a close-knit Mexican family unit, I found the book’s themes absolutely universal in their appeal. You might think that a picture book about the moment when a child breaks off from the family unit to become their own separate entity is an adolescent idea more than anything else. But who reads picture books? Younger siblings. For little brothers and sisters that have experienced a close connection with their older siblings, only to find them drifting away, there could be something familiar and maybe even a little comforting about this story. After all, for all that she physically separates from her family, the last line of the book assures us that, “Nonetheless, Julia is never alone.”

When we talk about representation in books for kids, we sometimes get a very specific, very narrow idea of what that can look like. That it’s all supposed to be stories about human people proclaiming their humanness. And there’s a place for those books, absolutely, but, to my mind, if we’re actually serious about diversifying the children’s books on our shelves then it has to go way beyond that. We need more books where the stories are familiar but hilarious. Strange and goofy. We have never gotten an adequate number of goofy books by BIPOC creators in a given year. But just as Bad Bunny expanded our understanding of what national entertainment can be during his Superbowl halftime show, The Muéganos expands our understanding of what children’s literature can be capable of. Our children deserve the funny, the strange, the peculiar, and the wild from as many different cultures as possible. This book could be a seminal text on the subject.

You won’t find any information on how Jaque Jours created the art for this book on its publication page. Fortunately, I have it on good authority that aside from the paintings, the shattered ceramic plate in this book really was precisely that. Jaque smashed the plate and then painted on it. Early in the book, I should explain, we see a blue ceramic plate with an image of the family and their name on it. After Julia’s breakaway, the plate is seen shattered on the floor. This shattered plate is a choice, both visual and from a storytelling perspective, that serves as a marvelous visual explanation of both the pain and the potential that comes when a kid establishes their true independence for the very first time. Indeed, the text on that page reads, “But some things are just inevitable.” The next pages show the shattered pieces, each one with a little picture of Julia doing something on her own, like painting or pottery. When we see her sitting in an armchair near her family, the plate has been repaired and is hanging behind her, albeit with a couple pieces missing here and there. It’s an incredible example of thematic continuity, all within the framework of a single metaphor.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with other picture books with the theme of beloved older siblings growing apart from the family unit. I know that they’re out there, but the ones I’m able to think of tend to be long or wordy affairs. This book is short, sweet, and utterly odd. It takes the logistics of its premise very seriously, thinking through everything (even toilets). But it’s its deep and abiding affection for families like this one that sticks with the reader the most. After all, the book ends with two pages of photographs that read, “This is the Rodriguez family. We do everything together. We barely fit in these frames, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.” There will be children that see these pages and yearn and yearn for large families of their own. That would be Jacque Jours’s power. She may warn you of the downsides, but her good-natured love of families like this, including her own, shines from these pages. Those simultaneous urges for independence and interdependence have never been better exemplified than here. A marvel.

On shelves May 5^th. Releases simultaneously in Spanish.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2026, Reviews, Reviews 2026