Books like The Truth about Dragons
By Julie Leung
For the child who is more than one place, one language, or one story — this is a bedtime tale that holds two worlds at once without asking him to pick. Lyrical, hushed, and richly imagined, like a lullaby with roots in two mythologies.
On the night a child is born, the whole natural world responds — the moon lingers, geese fly home, polar bears dance — celebrating that this one and only child has arrived.
A poor washerwoman on the island of Martinique uses her mother's magic wand to help her beloved goddaughter Cendrillon win the heart of a rich man's son.
A child drifts into a dream that carries her across the ocean to Africa, where the faces, places, and rhythms of an ancestral homeland come vividly to life.
A young Hawaiian girl named Ano explores her island home through canoes, hawks, and forest lizards, then learns hula — the storytelling dance that carries her people's history — and discovers what aloha truly means.
A young Asian girl notices her eyes look different from her friends' — then realizes her eyes match her mother's, grandmother's, and little sister's, and learns to see them as beautiful.
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 little girl sets off to find the perfect gift for her mother, journeying up through the sky and meeting the stars, the moon, and the sun along the way.
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 mistreated girl finds comfort in a fish with golden eyes — and when her stepmother kills it, the fish's bones become a spirit that grants her a gown and golden slippers for the spring festival.
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.
A young boy spends his mornings with his Baba, his grandmother, tending her garden and eating together, until the day comes when he gets to care for her the way she's always cared for him.
A young Hmong refugee girl longs for things her family can't afford — ice cream, a new dress, meat for dinner — until her grandmother helps her see beauty in what she already has.
