Published June 2024 via Graphix
★★★★
Lia's not excited to move to Montreal—a new country, a new language, and getting her period all at once just seems like a bit...much. But off to Montreal it is, and she dives in, with occasionally mixed results and occasionally mixed enthusiasm, to figure it out.
This was lovely. Beautiful (and detailed) art with lots of colour, and plenty of themes to keep the book from feeling repetitive: new school, learning a new language (Lia speaks a bit of English but almost no French at the beginning of the book), family dynamics, new friendships, crushes, and on it goes. I love the friendships she builds with the other girls in her French immersion class—they all have different backgrounds, and in another context their lives might not overlap, but they're all fish out of water together and good at cheering each other on. (I did wish we could see a bit more of their lives and backgrounds!)
I read Uprooted just before this, so I was interested to see how Calin addressed different languages—here, it's a different colour of speech bubble for each language that is spoken (Romanian, French, English). Before Lia's French improves, a lot of the other characters' speech is depicted as scribbles, but the more comfortable she gets with French, the less space those scribbles take up, and the less fractured her own speech gets. It's well done.
Mostly one for the middle grade crowd, but especially for middle grade or young adult readers who are starting a similar adventure of their own.
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