Mindy Kim and the Yummy Seaweed Business

Lyla Lee's Mindy Kim and the Yummy Seaweed Business is a first-day-at-a-new-school story for 6 year olds about a girl with a plan and a very long list.

What happens

Mindy is seven and a half. She wants three things. A puppy, somebody to sit with at lunch, and her dad to stop looking so sad.

They've just moved from California to Florida, into a house with a proper garden, which Mindy has correctly identified as excellent puppy territory.

Her dad says she has to prove she's responsible first. So she's tidied her room and put only three toy dogs on the bed. The other ten are underneath it, taking turns.

Then she starts at Wishbone Elementary and nothing goes to plan.

The new teacher tries her Korean name, gives up, and asks whether she has an English one. At lunch, a girl points at her dried seaweed and asks what it is, a boy repeats the word seaweed loudly, and the whole table laughs.

Mindy goes very red and stops being hungry. That evening she doesn't tell anyone what happened.

Her fightback is the best part of the book. She writes goals in sparkly blue ink in her Shiba Inu notebook, makes one friend who thinks the seaweed sounds brilliant, and the two of them work out that if the other children want to try it, they could charge for it.

She is a superb narrator. She notices everything and judges most of it. She interrogates her new babysitter about puppies and ice cream flavours and awards her one point out of two (the wrong answer was vanilla). And she would dearly like to know where Mrs Potts got the extra t, but her dad says asking would be rude.

What gives it weight is what sits underneath. Mindy's mum died a few months before the book starts, after being ill for a long time, and it's there on the first page when her dad drops a box of her favourite plates.

It isn't dwelt on and it isn't a secret. It's simply the reason they moved, the reason her dad works late, and the reason Mindy keeps quietly deciding not to make him sadder.

That may be a lot for a child who has lost someone, or who has started worrying about losing someone. For most readers it's handled so lightly that they'll take it in their stride and remember the seaweed.

Also worth knowing that the teasing is about her food and her name specifically, which may land differently depending on your reader.

What to read next

If they want more of Mindy's opinions, Mindy Kim and the Lunar New Year Parade is in the library too. It's the first Lunar New Year without her mum, Mindy would rather skip the whole thing, and her dad has already bought the tickets.