By Michael Dorris
A Taíno brother and sister on a Bahamian island in 1492 take turns telling you about their ordinary days, right up to the last one, when Morning Girl swims out to say hello to the men who have just rowed a boat onto her beach.
Morning Girl loves the dawn. Her brother, Star Boy, loves the dark and the wind and stays up half the night, which she thinks is ridiculous. They take turns narrating, a chapter each, and for most of the eighty pages that's the whole book: an island, a family, and two children who can't stand each other slowly working out that they're on the same side. Their mother tells them a baby is coming, and then a month later it isn't. A hurricane hits at night with Star Boy still out in it. Morning Girl goes looking for her own face in a still pool of water, because she has never seen it and wants to know what other people see when they look at her. These are small days, told slowly, in a life nobody is worried about yet. Then comes the last chapter. Morning Girl is swimming when a canoe rows toward the island carrying strangers with hair on their faces, and she does the polite thing, the thing you do for guests: she swims out to welcome them and runs to fetch her family. The book stops there, with her thrilled to have guests. After it comes a short epilogue, a few lines copied straight from Christopher Columbus's diary describing the people he has just found. She has no idea who has arrived. You do.
The reason the ending works is that the history stays out of the room for the first seventy-five pages. Your child just gets to live on the island — the sulking, the swimming, the brother who won't stop talking about the stars — until Morning Girl and Star Boy are people, not a subject. Read as a timeline, what happens to the Taíno is a fact a child files away. Spend a week with Morning Girl first, and by the time she runs down the beach to be a good host, they know her. It's also short, and because the chapters trade back and forth between the two of them, a child who stalls in one voice gets a fresh one on the next page.