Stella Diaz Has Something to Say

Angela Dominguez's Stella Diaz Has Something to Say is a warm school story for 6 year olds about a girl whose words keep getting stuck.

What happens

Stella's in third grade in Chicago. She loves drawing, she loves anything that lives in the sea and she loves Pancho, who's a betta fish. Bettas are happy on their own. Stella isn't.

At home she's chatty and funny. Friday night is spaghetti and meatballs with Mum and her big brother Nick, then cards and salsa dancing round the living room. School is a different story. Jenny, her best friend, has been put in a different class. And when Stella's nervous, her cheeks go red (roja, as she puts it) and her English and Spanish get muddled.

So when Stanley turns up from Texas, new and friendly, she's desperate to make friends. Then she introduces herself in Spanish by mistake and falls backwards off her chair in front of everyone. Oh, Stella!

It's such an honest book. Stella tells it herself, and you feel every hot-cheeked moment right along with her. She goes to speech class and wishes she didn't have to. She learns that having a green card makes her an "alien" and spends a whole celebration wondering if she really belongs. A girl in her class starts calling her "Stella Stares". None of it feels heavy, though. There's so much love in her family, and Jenny is the best kind of friend.

There's lots of Spanish sprinkled through, and it's always easy to work out from the sentence around it. Stella's parents are divorced and her dad isn't very reliable, which comes up a couple of times.

Who hasn't wished they could think of the right thing to say just a few seconds sooner? If your reader's on the shy side, or has ever felt like the odd one out, they'll really get Stella. And if they're a chatterbox, it's a lovely way to see things from the quieter kid's side.

What to read next

When they're ready for something a bit longer, Lety Out Loud is about another girl who grew up speaking Spanish and sometimes lets her best friend ask the questions for her, this time at a summer camp at an animal shelter.