Sorted by one question and one only: how much English does this book demand before a child can do anything at all with it? That is the sort a teacher with English learners actually needs, and it is almost never the sort you are given. It starts at zero. The Arrival, Unspoken and Mirror have no words in them anywhere, which means a child who landed on Tuesday with no English can do the whole task, properly, on the same terms as everyone else in the room. From there the demand rises: three picture books with short plain text, then a novel written in verse, then a full-length novel. Now the honest part, which belongs at the top rather than buried at the bottom. A wordless book does not teach English. It gives a child a way to take part today, and that is worth a great deal, and it is not the same thing as building vocabulary. The sort is a tool for you, not a route for a child to walk.
The sort is the whole page, so here it is properly. At zero English: The Arrival, Unspoken and Mirror have no story text whatsoever. A child with nothing can do these completely, which is close to impossible anywhere else on your shelf, and The Arrival is the one that matters most for an older child, because it is a hundred and twenty-eight pages and looks and feels like a serious book. That is the bit teachers underrate. An eleven-year-old newcomer is usually handed something written for six-year-olds, and they know exactly what it means, and they are insulted. Next up, short plain text: My Two Blankets, La Frontera and Juana & Lucas. Then Inside Out & Back Again, which is a novel in verse, and here is the counter-intuitive thing worth saying out loud, because it goes against every instinct. Free verse is easier for an English learner than prose, not harder. The lines are short, there is white space around everything, the sentences do not stack into paragraphs, and a page holds forty words rather than four hundred. It looks like poetry and it reads like a hand on the back. Then Front Desk, which is three hundred pages of ordinary novel and is the real English demand on this page. Two books here do something the others cannot. Juana & Lucas is bilingual by design: Medina puts Spanish straight into her English sentences and mostly refuses to explain it, so a Spanish-speaking child reads it faster than you do and is the expert in the room for once. If you have Spanish speakers, that inversion is the single most useful thing on this page, and it costs you nothing but the discipline to stop translating. La Frontera goes further and prints the full Spanish and the full English side by side on every page, so a Spanish speaker reads the actual book in their actual language, at their actual age. And Mirror is two books in one case, an Australian boy on the left and a Moroccan boy on the right, and the Moroccan half is bound to open right to left, with Arabic on its first page. For a room with Arabic readers that is not decoration. That is their direction, printed and bound and taken seriously, and it is a fact worth knowing before you buy it. One book on this page is the outlier and needs handling on its own terms. Unspoken is wordless, so the sort puts it at zero, and the sort is misleading about it. It is the Underground Railroad: a white girl on a Southern farm finds someone hiding in her barn, feeds them in secret while armed men come asking questions, and the book ends without telling you whether that person got away. That is heavy and historically specific and it is not a general no-English-needed pick. Reach for it when you are teaching that history, and not because it happens to have no words in it.