By Junot Díaz
Lola's teacher asks the class to draw where their family came from, and Lola is the one child who can't, because she left the Island as a baby and remembers none of it.
Every child in Lola's class is from somewhere else, so when her teacher says draw the country your family came from, everyone gets going. Except Lola. She was a baby when they left the Island. She has nothing. Not one picture in her head. So she goes and asks: her abuela, Mr. Mir upstairs, the lady at the salon, the poet on the corner, her cousin, the whole loud building. And they give her pieces. Bats as big as blankets. Music coming out of everything. A hurricane that sounded like a thousand trains. And then, more carefully, a Monster that sat on the Island for thirty years and made everyone afraid, until people finally drove it off. Lola takes all of it and draws the Island she has never seen, and it turns out she was carrying it around the whole time in other people's mouths.
This is the book for the child everyone assumes has an immigration story and who actually has none of their own. Lola didn't leave anywhere she can remember. She was carried. That's an enormous number of children, and almost nothing on the shelf is about them, which is why this one earns its place. It also does something clever: Lola's answer isn't found inside her, it's assembled out of the people around her, so the book is really about a child interviewing her own building. That makes it the most active book here — she's asking, not receiving. The text is chatty and long-ish and full of English rhythm and jokes, so this is a read-aloud rather than a hand-over. The country is never named. It's the Dominican Republic, and the Monster is the dictator Rafael Trujillo.