By Cynthia Kadohata
A younger sister worships her radiant big sister, then has to learn to see the world's shine on her own after Lynn falls ill.
Katie Takeshima's big sister Lynn taught her her favorite word: kira-kira, Japanese for glittering. Lynn could find it almost anywhere — in the sky, in the blue-black sea, in a person's eyes. It is the 1950s, and their Japanese American family moves from Iowa to a small town in Georgia, where their parents take grueling jobs in a poultry hatchery and theirs are often the only Asian faces in town. Lynn is the one headed for college, the one Katie would follow anywhere. Then Lynn starts getting tired and pale and sick, and the sickness has a name that does not go away. Katie tells it all in her plain, loving voice — the car trips, the crowded apartment, the night shifts, and the way the whole family reshapes its life around her sister.
Plenty of books at this age have a death in them, but most arrive all at once. This one asks something slower and heavier: you watch Lynn fade across many pages, so the ache becomes less a single blow than a long goodbye to a sister a reader may come to love as fiercely as Katie does. What keeps it from being only sad is what Lynn leaves behind — her gift for finding kira-kira, the glitter, in ordinary things — and the quiet turn near the end where Katie begins to see the world that way herself, once Lynn no longer can. For a patient reader who can stay with a long, gorgeous grief, it is one of the finest books you can hand them right now.