By Meg Medina
Mia's grandmother moves in speaking Spanish, Mia speaks English, and a parrot named Mango helps them find each other's words.
Abuela moves in with Mia's family, leaving behind the house and the birds she had back home. She speaks Spanish. Mia speaks English and almost no Spanish. They share a room now, and they can't really talk to each other, which stings, because Mia has things she wants to tell her and Abuela has stories that won't come across. So Mia starts leaving English words on cards around the room, and Abuela hands Spanish ones back. Then a parrot named Mango comes home, learns words in both languages, and starts saying them out loud, and that's what finally opens everything up. The story is told in English with Spanish woven in, all in the regular alphabet, so you can follow every word of it without knowing any Spanish.
If there's a grandparent in your child's life they can't quite talk to, a different first language and not enough shared words to bridge it, this is the picture book that names it. Mia's trouble isn't that Spanish is hard. It's that she loves someone she can't have a conversation with. A child who has sat through a phone call with an abuela or a halmoni or a nonna, nodding along and understanding almost none of it, may recognize the exact feeling. And the book is patient about the fix: the words come slowly, on cards, over weeks, so it never pretends a language shows up in an afternoon.