By Juana Medina
A girl in Bogotá who is furious about having to learn English, which makes her the one child on this shelf who is on the other side of the argument.
Juana lives in Bogotá with her Mami and her dog Lucas, who is the best amigo there has ever been. She loves drawing. She loves Brussels sprouts, which she knows is strange. She does not love her itchy school uniform, she does not love math, and she absolutely does not love the English lessons they have started making her do, because English makes no sense, the spelling is a lie, and she already has a perfectly good language, thank you. She complains about it magnificently for most of the book. Then her abuelos tell her about a trip they want to take her on, somewhere fantastic and far away where everybody speaks English, and Juana reconsiders her position at speed. Juana Medina wrote and drew it out of her own Bogotá childhood, and the pictures are all over the pages, with the words swooping and growing and shrinking around them.
Every other book about a child and a new language has the child struggling and then succeeding. Juana is cross. She thinks English is a stupid imposition and she says so at length, and the book lets her be funny and correct about it for chapter after chapter before she comes round for reasons of her own, which is a wildly more honest picture of what learning a language actually feels like from inside a seven-year-old. The other reason it earns its place: Medina drops Spanish straight into the English sentences and mostly does not stop to explain it. Amigo, abuelos, Mami. For a Spanish-speaking child that turns the room upside down, because they are reading the book faster than the teacher is. And it is short, funny, and drawn on nearly every page, so a child who is still building up to chapter books can finish it and feel like they finished something.