By Raúl the Third
Little Lobo hauls a wagon of deliveries through a border-town mercado where almost everything on the page is labeled in Spanish.
Little Lobo and his dog Bernabé have deliveries to make. They load the wagon and set off into the mercado of a Mexican-American border town, and the market is absolutely stuffed — luchadores, barbers, fruit stalls, a man who wants his clothespins, a comic book about El Toro. The story runs in English. But the pictures are covered in Spanish labels, the way a market is covered in signs: every crate, every stall, every animal has its Spanish name written next to it. When Little Lobo speaks Spanish, the translation sits at the bottom of the page. There's a glossary at the back that translates 98 of them. It's drawn in ballpoint pen with the density of a Richard Scarry page, and your child will find something new on the fourth read.
The Spanish isn't in the story here, it's in the world. That's a completely different way of learning a word and it suits a certain child perfectly — the one who won't sit for a language book but will happily spend twenty minutes finding things. Because the labels sit on the objects, the meaning is just there in the picture, so a family with no Spanish at all can still get almost all of it. And it's a real place. This is a specific border town with a specific market, drawn by someone who grew up going to one, so your child ends up somewhere rather than nowhere.