Mindy Kim and the Lunar New Year Parade

Lyla Lee's Mindy Kim and the Lunar New Year Parade is a warm little chapter book for 6 year olds about the first big holiday after a family has changed shape.

What happens

Mindy is almost eight. In Korea she'd be nine, because you turn a year older at New Year rather than on your birthday, and her dad explains this in the car on the way to school.

Nine, Mindy decides, is definitely old enough for a puppy.

Then she remembers what last year's Lunar New Year was like. Games and rice cakes and karaoke with every Korean family in the neighbourhood. Her mum was there.

This year it's just her and her dad, and a parade in Orlando.

The whole book is built out of small true things like that. Eunice's mum makes tteokguk and packs some for Dad to eat when he gets in from work. Mindy takes rice cakes into school for show and tell, explains the lunar calendar to her class, and one girl pulls a face and says "Ew" about the red bean. Plenty of the others want seconds.

She invites her best friend Sally along to the parade, mostly so it won't feel so empty.

Then there's a nightmare where she can't find either of her parents, and she wakes up with her face wet and doesn't tell her dad about it in case it makes him sad. That's the thing Mindy keeps doing. She looks after him. It's very gently done and any child who has tiptoed around a grown-up will recognise it straight away.

At the parade there are lion dancers and dragons and taiko drums, and Mindy waits and waits for the Korean group, and it never comes.

And then Sally spots a giant Pikachu, and Mindy runs off into the crowd after it, and when she turns round her dad isn't behind her.

A note before you start. Mindy's mother died, and although the book never dwells on it, it is the reason for everything in the story. Her hanbok is too small now and she won't have a new one because a new one wouldn't be from her mum. If your reader has lost someone, that may land hard. If they're just curious about how other families do things, this is a kind and very easy way in.

What to read next

If Mindy wins them over, the Yummy Seaweed Business is where she starts, brand new in Florida with a snack nobody at her table has ever seen before and a plan to earn enough for a puppy.