April 15, 2025 by Dial Books
Laila helps her parents when they struggle with everyday tasks involving the English language, and even translates for her teacher at conferences, not always telling the truth! She feels important, and Mama and Baba are proud of her. She feels bad when other students make fun of the fact that her parents' English skills aren't great, because she knows how many interesting things they DO know. Since language classes are expensive, Laila decides that she will become her parents' teacher. While Laila still struggles herself with some idiomatic language, she works hard with her parents to increase their knowledge. Soon, the family is sharing jokes in both English and Chinese, and Laila's mother is able to understand Laila's teacher at conferences and tell her that she is proud of Laila.
Yang, whose middle grade Front Desk has been hugely popular, and who has written several Young Adult novels as well, brings her own childhood experiences to add a personal touch to this familiar tale of children helping out parents who struggle with language. My community has more Somali, Nepali, and Yemeni immigrants, but Laila's tale is not dependent upon a particular language. I did enjoy the fact that there were some Chinese store signs and words included. "Add oil" is a refrain in the book; it means to keep going, because everything moves faster with oil. It reminded me a bit of the old phrase "Now you're cooking with gas"!
The artwork is delightful, and Laila and her parents are shown in a variety of settings. They go to shops, the bank, school, and spend time in their apartment. There's plenty of white space on the page so the words are very clear, and there aren't too many sentences on each page. This makes it perfect for classroom story times, and I can see this being used to help build empathy.
It's great to see young children wanting to help out in books like Compestine's The Chinese New Year Helper, and Laila and her parents efforts to learn a new language will ring true with readers who were invested in titles like Amy Wu and the Warm Welcome, by Zhang and Chua, Drawn Together, by Lê and Santat, Vo's Gibberish, and Wang and Yum's Luli and the Language of Tea.
September 30, 2025 by Candlewick
Copy provided by Young Adult Books Central
A child struggles with reading books as the words tumble about the pages. This is frustrating and leads to a bit of a temper tantrum, as well as the thought that reading is something that will never be figured out. Mountains of red letters appear on the pages, but eventually the child starts to make some sense of them. This ends on a positive note as the letters come to shape a flower, a house, and trees, and the child feels that anything is possible. An author's note at the end details her own struggles with dyslexia and some of her strategies to make reading easier.
I love that the book is printed in a dyslexia friendly font, and the two color illustrations are spare and cut down on distractions. The mountains of letters look daunting, and the child's frustrations are palpable. It's good that eventually things start to be easier to navigate.
It would have been good to see some strategies depicted in the text of the book, although that might have slowed down the narrative pace. Children who are struggling with their own reading will feel emboldened when they see representation of another reader struggling. Combine this with Rudolph's Brilliant Bea, Beaty's Aaron Slater, Illustrator, Fortune's Did You Say Pasghetti? and Harris and Wick's Magnificent Meg to help children understand some of the reading struggles of dyslexia.
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