Islandborn cover

Islandborn

by Junot Día

A girl tries to remember the island she left as a baby.

For you if

your child was born somewhere else but carries a homeland in their family's stories

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Lola left her Caribbean island when she was a baby and doesn't remember it. Her teacher asks the class to draw their home countries. Lola asks everyone she knows — neighbors, family, strangers — to describe the island to her. What she collects is a mosaic of memory, love, and the Monster that made so many people leave. Díaz wrote this picture book after Hurricane Maria as a dispatch from inside the diaspora's relationship with a home that exists more in story than in memory. The most tender thing on the Puerto Rico shelf and the most essential for the youngest readers.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Puerto Rico • Caribbean
Voice
Written by a Puerto Rican author

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dir. Ava DuVernay

Racism is the symptom. Caste is the disease.

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Why it’s here: Punk in daring to name America's racial order as a caste system, kin to India's and Nazi Germany's, rather than a uniquely American aberration. Pedagogical in dramatizing how a writer's own grief becomes the engine of rigorous, world-spanning research.

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