Books like I Hate Borsch!
By Yevgenia Nayberg
For the kid who turns up their nose at grandma's cooking now but might feel differently about it someday, this book sits right in that tension between rejecting and missing where you come from. witty, wistful, visually bold with streaks of beet-red
After spotting three dazzling mermaids on the subway, a boy transforms his home into a lagoon of imagination, fashioning his own mermaid costume from a curtain and some ferns.
A Puerto Rican girl grows up surrounded by love and pride in her Taíno and African heritage, but painful treatment from the world slowly dims her sense of her own beauty — until her community rallies to wake her up again.
Voted the most beautiful bird in the forest, a glossy blackbird is begged by the red, yellow, blue, and green birds to paint markings of black onto their feathers so they can be beautiful too.
A girl who left her homeland as a baby must draw it for a school assignment, so she gathers memories from family and neighbors to imagine her way back to The Island.
A witch famous throughout Russia for eating children is secretly a lonely old woman who longs for a grandchild, so she disguises herself as a village babushka to find one.
Two identical-looking twin sisters share the same eyes, cheeks, and smiles, but as they make dumplings, get haircuts, and practice magic tricks, their differences keep showing through.
A girl and her house full of rescued, misfit creatures grow restless and decide to move on — but when every one of her careful plans falls apart, she has to find another way forward.
A mother cat leads her two kittens, Fluffy and Skinny, through washing, wall-walking, and claw-sharpening — while a third kitten, Boris, just naps through it all.
A girl in Hawaiʻi who feels neither wahine nor kane sets her sights on leading her school's boys-only hula troupe in a traditional kane chant.
A foreign exchange student named Eric moves in with a suburban family, asking curious questions his hosts can't always answer, until his farewell leaves behind an unforgettable surprise.
After an owl attack knocks a baby fruit bat from her mother's grasp, she lands in a bird's nest and is raised alongside three baby birds, learning to live by their rules — until she finds her way back to her own kind.
