In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson

Bette Bao Lord's In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson is a story for 8 year olds about a girl who lands in Brooklyn without a word of English.

What happens

She starts out as Sixth Cousin, called Bandit by everybody, the thirty-third member of the House of Wong living under its roofs in China. She breaks a water urn at New Year, which is the worst possible moment to break anything, and she's summoned to her grandmother fully expecting the cane.

What she gets instead is the news that her father's sent for her and her mother, and that America's going to be home.

She picks her own American name on the way out. Shirley Temple Wong.

Brooklyn's marvellous for about a fortnight. There's a machine that keeps food cold, so you only have to shop once a week. There's a bridge she wants to leap out of the taxi and touch.

Then school starts, and the book gets much better and much sadder.

Shirley can't follow a word, so she copies instead. She watches the principal blink slowly at her, decides that's how Americans show friendship, and spends the whole day blinking back at her teacher (who sends a note home suggesting an eye test). Later she learns a poem off a record, sound by sound, without knowing what a single one of them means. She stands up to recite it and the class laughs. Her teacher laughs too.

That chapter's called A Hungry Ghost and the title's exactly right. She's standing there and nobody can see her.

It's a warm book rather than a bleak one. The lunch bought without permission at the corner shop and eaten on a sheet of brown paper on an icy pavement is one of the great meals in children's books. But the loneliness is honest and unhurried, and any reader who's been the new one in a class will know precisely what that feels like.

Baseball's the other half of it. The year's 1947, Jackie Robinson is playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers and he's everybody's hero, and what he's doing turns out to matter to Shirley as much as to anyone in Brooklyn.

What to read next

If this one lands, Kelly Yang's Finally Seen is about a ten year old flying in from Beijing to parents she hasn't seen for five years, and having to work out who she is in a language she doesn't have yet.