By Yuyi Morales
A mother and her baby cross into a new country with almost nothing and find their way into a new language through the doors of a public library, the author's own true story.
This is Yuyi Morales telling what actually happened to her. She left Mexico and crossed into the United States carrying her baby son and not much else. They didn't know the language. They got lost, they made mistakes, and for a while the world felt closed and strange, with people looking at them like they didn't belong. Then one day they walked into a public library, a place that asked nothing of them and let them stay, and the books there slowly gave them the words for their new life. The pictures are extraordinary, packed with color and small treasures, and the last pages open into an author's note about the real journey behind it.
It's an immigrant story told from the inside by someone who lived it, so it never feels like a lesson. It feels like a gift being handed to you. The hard parts are real but held gently: they were afraid, they were unsure, they were sometimes made to feel unwelcome. But the heart of it is what a library, and the books in it, can do for a family with no other footing. For a child in an immigrant family it's a proud mirror, and for any child it's a way to understand what arriving somewhere new actually asks of you.