By Linda Sue Park
A hungry child helps her mother cook the family dinner, in rhyme, and then there's the actual recipe at the back.
A Korean American child is starving and dinner is bee-bim bop — mix-mix rice, meat and vegetables piled on top and then stirred all together. The whole book is her helping and hurrying: the shop, the chopping, the rice, laying the table, and all the way through, the same impatient refrain. Hungry, hungry, hungry for bee-bim bop. The rhyme bounces so hard it's almost a chant. Then the family sits down, everybody mixes their own bowl, and at the back of the book is the real recipe for it.
The impatience is the point, and it's the thing a food-obsessed four-year-old recognizes instantly — this book is about being hungry NOW and having to wait while a grown-up chops things, which is your child's actual life. Linda Sue Park wrote it for her own children and the rhythm is built to be said out loud, so it works as a bedtime book for a child who can't read a word. The recipe at the back is the part that changes what it is. It means a book you read on Tuesday can be a Saturday your child spends stirring a real pot, and the food is Korean, from a Korean family's kitchen, not a version of it made simpler for anybody.