By Monica Brown
A Peruvian-Scottish-American girl who loves polka dots with stripes and peanut-butter-and-jelly burritos decides that not matching is exactly what makes her herself.
Marisol is Peruvian, Scottish, and American all at once, with red hair and brown skin and a name that's half one place and half another. And she likes things that don't match: green polka dots with purple stripes, a peanut butter and jelly burrito, a soccer-playing pirate princess. People keep telling her she doesn't match, until she starts to wonder if she should try. So for one day she matches everything, matching clothes, matching lunch, matching games, and she's miserable. By the end she decides that being wonderfully mismatched is the truest version of her. The book runs in both English and Spanish on every page.
It takes the specific experience of a mixed-heritage child, not fitting neatly into one box and being told you're a mismatch, and makes it the best thing about her rather than a problem to solve. Marisol is funny and sure of herself, so it never feels like a message book. It feels like meeting a child you'd want at your lunch table. For a multiracial or bicultural child it's a rare mirror, and for any child it's permission to be a little bit of everything.