Read Mindy Kim and the Birthday Puppy free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Lyla Lee's Mindy Kim and the Birthday Puppy is a short chapter book for 6 year olds about a girl who has wanted one thing for a very long time.
Mindy is eight today. Not seven, not seven and a half. EIGHT.
She shoves her corgi cuddly toy behind her back when her dad opens the bedroom door, because big kids don't sleep with stuffed animals, and the bigger a kid she seems the likelier it is that her dad finally says yes to a puppy.
Breakfast is seaweed soup, which is what you eat on your birthday if you're Korean, and then a video call to her grandparents in Korea. Her mum used to make the soup. Her dad makes it now. It isn't as good, and Mindy doesn't tell him.
That's how the whole book handles the sad part. Mindy's mother died, and it surfaces the way it really does for a child, sideways and in the middle of something lovely, and then she gets on with her party.
The party is in a park. Pizza, Korean food, hide and seek, a mint choc chip ice cream cake with her name on it in pink icing. And every present on the table is far too small to be a puppy.
The good thing is that the book doesn't stop once the dog turns up. It gets much more interested in what happens next, which is the honest bit. Theodore chews a blanket that belonged to Mindy's mum. He isn't house trained. He's terrified of water, of the dog park and of other dogs, and Mindy keeps shoving him towards all three because she thinks she's helping, and then feels awful.
Her babysitter Eunice teaches her how it's actually done. Stop walking the moment he pulls. Start again only when he's calm. Treat him the second he gets it right. It takes fifteen goes to teach him to lie down.
This is a very kind book. No villain, nobody nasty, and a child who's currently campaigning for a pet will finish it in one sitting and then start quoting Eunice at you over dinner.
Worth knowing that Mindy's mum comes up on several pages, always briefly and always gently. A child who has lost someone might find that lovely or might find it close to the bone, and you'll be the judge of which.
If they want to know how Mindy and her dad ended up in a big empty house in Florida with no friends in it, the Yummy Seaweed Business is where it all starts.
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