Our Subway Baby

Overview

Our Subway Baby is a picture book grounded in the real experience of its author, Peter Mercurio, who tells the story of how his family came to be. Years before Peter and his husband Danny raised a son together, Danny had discovered an abandoned newborn wrapped in a sweatshirt on a subway platform. The book traces the improbable path from that chance discovery to the moment the two men, now a couple, were able to adopt the very child Danny had once rescued.

Told for a young audience, the narrative moves gently between memory and present-day family life, framing an unusual origin story as one grounded in persistence, care, and eventual belonging. The book keeps its focus on the child at the center of the story and the adults who chose, deliberately and repeatedly, to make him theirs.

As a work aimed at children, it favors plain, warm language over complexity, using the shape of a rescue-and-reunion story to introduce readers to a family formed through adoption rather than biology.

The Story Behind the Story

Picture books built from an author's own life carry a particular kind of authority, and Our Subway Baby leans into that: its power comes less from invention than from the fact that the events it describes actually happened. In doing so, it joins a small but growing shelf of children's books that use true personal history to normalize family structures that once rarely appeared in the genre at all, including families headed by same-sex parents and families built through adoption.

The book's setting, a New York City subway station, also roots an otherwise unusual sequence of events in an ordinary, recognizable place, which has the effect of making an extraordinary coincidence feel plausible and grounded rather than sentimental. Read alongside other adoption narratives for children, it stands out for centering the parents' long, uncertain process of pursuing custody as much as the dramatic circumstances of the child's discovery, giving young readers a sense that families are built through sustained effort as well as chance.

Why Our Subway Baby Has Been Challenged

Family structure and same-sex parenting are the substance of most objections raised against this title. Because the book presents two men as a married couple raising a child together, without treating that arrangement as remarkable or requiring justification, some challengers have argued that it introduces subject matter they consider inappropriate for the picture-book age range or that should be left to parents to address at home rather than encountered in a school or library setting. Other objections have centered more broadly on the presence of LGBTQ characters and themes in material intended for young children, echoing concerns raised against similar titles regardless of a book's specific content. In this catalog, Our Subway Baby has been the subject of 2 state-level and 2 district-level challenges, generally arising from these concerns rather than from any depiction of violence or explicit content within the story itself.