![]() The “ bighearted,” “ irrepressible” and “ energetic” counting book is as bouncy as you’d imagine the bus to be. As farmers, goats, street vendors, chickens, scuba divers and more cram onto the bus, Khan squeezes in Swahili and Arabic words, and López loads head scarves and umbrellas with African patterns. ![]() ![]() Khan and illustrator Mercè López did their research to tell the story in English of siblings Musa and Dada riding the daladala to the beach in an authentic way. “As a Muslim, who was born in India and grew up in the Middle East, it was exciting to see how Zanzibari culture-music, food, language, architecture, clothing, etc, reflected a mix of several worlds I already felt connected to,” said the author of Room for Everyone. Khan pitched the idea to her Swahili-speaking friends, but ultimately they encouraged her to do the writing. “I literally remember wiggling, giggling and thinking to myself-gosh, someone has to turn this into a children’s book,” Khan told School Library Journal. It was on this trip that she found herself on a raucous, jam-packed, hour-and-a-half-long bus ride to Nungwi Beach. When Naaz Khan was working for a refugee resettlement agency in Africa, she took a trip to Zanzibar, Tanzania, to celebrate Eid, marking the end of Ramadan. Of all the new releases in 2021, I find these ten to be the most graceful. I know a clumsy narrative when I see one. Splash, splash, splash!Īs an adult (and an editor) reading children’s books, I can separate the big, fat, belly flops from the swan dives. It’s like jumping time and time again off a dock-a dive here, a cannonball or a can-opener there. They are little chain readers, my preschooler handing book after book over for me to read aloud, which I do gladly. Luckily, as a mother to two young daughters, ages 4 and 7, I’m fully immersed in the world of children’s literature. It’s akin to the feeling when you “dive into the cool, clear water of a lake,” to borrow from Alison McGhee’s Someday, a picture book about a mother’s wish for her child to live life to its fullest, and a personal favorite. It’s hard to describe the joy I get reading a children’s book.
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