Harriet Gets Carried Away

Overview

Harriet is a child who sees no occasion too small for a costume — she'll wear one to run errands, to sit in a dentist's chair, or simply because the day calls for it. When her two fathers throw her a dress-up birthday party, Harriet slips into her favorite penguin outfit to dash out and pick up the one thing the celebration is missing: party hats.

The errand doesn't go as planned. Dressed convincingly as a penguin, Harriet stumbles into an actual waddle of penguins and is swept along with them, carried farther from home than she intended. Costumed and surrounded by the real thing, she has to figure out whether she truly belongs among them or whether home — and the party waiting for her — is where she's meant to be.

The story unfolds as a light, briskly paced adventure built for a picture-book audience, pairing a gentle mix-up with a reassuring resolution about finding one's way back.

A Story of Imagination and Belonging

Jessie Sima, who also wrote and illustrated Not Quite Narwhal, returns to a theme that runs through her picture books: the gap between how a character looks and where they actually belong. Where that earlier book followed a narwhal-shaped unicorn puzzling out his identity, Harriet Gets Carried Away flips the premise — a human child dressed as a penguin is mistaken for one of the flock, and the humor comes from how seriously the real penguins take her disguise.

Underneath the costume play is a quieter reassurance common to the genre: that trying on another identity, even wholeheartedly, doesn't mean losing the one you started with. Harriet's eventual return home closes the loop on that idea, suggesting that imaginative wandering is safe precisely because there's a place to come back to.

The book also reflects a broader, ongoing shift in children's publishing toward picture books that include a wider range of family structures as simple background detail rather than as the subject of the story. Harriet's two fathers appear here the way most picture-book parents do — planning a party, waiting at home — without the household being treated as noteworthy within the narrative itself.

Why Harriet Gets Carried Away Has Been Challenged

The detail that has prompted objections is not Harriet's costume or her penguin adventure but the household she returns to: a family headed by two fathers, shown without comment as simply how her family is arranged. Some challengers have argued that depicting a same-sex parented family in a book aimed at young children amounts to introducing material about family structure or relationships that they consider unsuitable for that age group, even though the book itself treats the detail incidentally rather than as a topic of discussion.

This book has been challenged in 1 state and 2 districts tracked in this catalog, placing it alongside a wider pattern of recent objections to picture books where the presence of LGBTQ+ parents or caregivers — rather than any explicit content — has been the stated basis for removal or restriction requests.