By Irena Kobald
A girl who has fled a war arrives somewhere every sound is wrong, and her old language is the warm blanket she wraps around herself until she can weave a second one.
A girl her auntie calls Cartwheel comes to a new country because there is a war in the old one. She doesn't say much about the war. What she says is that here, when people talk, the sounds fall on her like a waterfall, cold and hard and sharp, and she cannot catch a single one. So she goes home and wraps herself up in her old language, which she pictures as a blanket, soft and warm and made out of her own words and her own sounds and everything she has ever known. Then a girl at the park says a word to her and hands it over. Then another. Cartwheel takes the words home and starts weaving them into a second blanket. It's scratchy and strange and it has holes in it. She keeps going. By the end she has two blankets, and she can wrap herself in either one.
What this book does that almost nothing else does is show a new language from the inside, with a picture instead of an explanation. Sounds you don't know are a waterfall, cold and too fast to catch. Sounds you do know are a blanket. A five-year-old gets that right away, and so does a grown-up who's never once been the one person in the room who couldn't follow along. For a child going through it now, it may land as a relief that the book takes their side: wanting your old blanket isn't a failure to try, it's what anyone does when they're cold. And Cartwheel doesn't swap one blanket for the other. She ends up with both, which is a truer ending than most books on this subject give you. The words are short and plain and the pictures carry the meaning, so this is one of the few books here you could hand to a child who has very little English yet.