By Pat Mora
A joyful romp through all the places children read, with the whole story running in both English and Spanish on every single page.
It's April 30th, El día de los niños, and everyone in this book is reading. A child reads in a hot air balloon. Another reads under a tree with the dog, or inside a submarine while a fish peers in. There are children reading on a llama, in a red convertible, out loud to a whole crowd of friends. There isn't much of a plot, and that's fine. It's a parade of children reading in every place you can dream up, painted by Rafael López in colors that practically jump off the page. And every spread carries the full text twice: the whole thing in English and the whole thing in Spanish, complete and side by side.
This is the book for a family where the grandparents read in Spanish and the parents read in English, and nobody wants to be handed a version they can't actually read. Both texts are complete, so an abuela can read the whole story to your child in Spanish tonight and you can read the whole story in English tomorrow. Same book, same pictures, same ending. Nobody gets the shortened one. A lot of books sold as bilingual turn out to be English with a few Spanish words dropped in, which leaves a Spanish-speaking reader with almost nothing to read. This one isn't like that.