When I was in grade school in the late 70s, I had a friend who, like debut author Waka T Brown, traveled to Japan to stay with grandparents regularly in order to keep his language skills current and connection to his culture fresh. I remember his complex feelings about the whole thing. Pride in his culture and love for his grandparents who seemed fiercely strict to me. But sadness at missing summer camp with his scout troop. I remember that kids teased him about his proficiency in martial arts. (This was before the movie Karate Kid made martial arts popular.) But I also remember how impressed we all were by his fluency in Japanese and the way he drew kanji with a brush pen.  I loved how  While I Was Away by Waka T Brown captured all the beautiful complexity of being a bicultural kid moving between Kansas and Japan and finding things to love in both places. The fastest growing group of children in America are biracial, bilingual, and bicultural kids. I’m always happy to find a book that celebrates them. The publisher is Quill Tree Books an imprint of HarperCollins.

One of my favorite things about historical fiction is the window they provide into seldom studied chapters in history. Letters from Cuba by Ruth Behar is an epistalory novel about a Jewish refugee putting down roots in Cuba while working to bring the rest of her family out of Poland during the horrors of the Second World War. Twelve year old Ester narrates her new and mostly welcoming life in Cuba in letters to the sister she left behind. It is based on the author’s own family story. It won a 2020 Pura Belpré Award and is from Nancy Paulson Books at Penguin Random House.