Author Meryl G. Gordon Receives Keshet Award for Her LGBT Children's Book 'The Flower Girl Wore Celery'
Last Sunday, at an event at Boston’s Temple Israel, author Meryl G. Gordon spoke about her new book, The Flower Girl Wore Celery, a children’s story about a flower girl who strews her petals down the aisle at a same-sex wedding. According to Gordon, the idea for the book was inspired by a very personal love and borne out of necessity: her son’s nuptials. “At the time we were looking everywhere for a book that would prepare our flower girl Emma for a Jewish wedding with a same-sex couple,” she said, “We couldn’t find anything.”
Frustrated, Gordon decided to write her own children’s book in which a little girl, also named Emma, is surprised that two women—one of whom Gordon purposely gave a gender-neutral name to—were being married. To add to the book’s overall joviality, fictional Emma confuses words like ring-bearer for ring-bear and the color celery for the actual vegetable.