By Mitali Perkins
Shanti leaves the monsoon for a snowy town on the other side of the world, and then spends every day walking back and forth between two homes that are both hers.
Shanti says goodbye to the monsoon rains in her village in India and lands in a small snowy American town, and from then on the book is about going back and forth. Out the front door for school, English, snow boots, a friend called Mia, a movie about a girl who saves the day. Back in the front door for Bangla, her mother's stories, ghugni and samosas, an aunt on the phone. Out again. In again. Shanti gets good at it and she gets tired of it, and there's a stretch where she is done, where the going back and forth feels like being torn in half and she wants somebody to just tell her which one she is. Nobody does. What she works out instead is that the path between the two doors is not a problem to be solved. It's where she lives.
The subject here isn't arriving. It's the year after arriving, which nobody writes about and every immigrant child lives in. Shanti isn't lost or friendless or laughed at. She has a friend, she has English, she's doing fine, and she's exhausted, because she is running a whole second life in the mornings and evenings that no one at school can see. Any child who speaks one language at home and another at school will sit up at that. And Mitali Perkins refuses the ending everybody expects, where the child picks a side and is finally at peace. Shanti stays in between and the book calls that home. There's a glossary of Bangla words at the back and an author's note about Perkins's own arrival, both worth reading.