A Home on the Page

A Hmong family’s “soft and sunny” morning shatters when young Nou opens her front door and finds a hateful message painted on their mailbox in this searching picture book. Though Mom tries to wash it off and Dad covers over it with paint, Nou laments, “It is not the first time a stranger has left us this kind of message.” Nou wants to leave America for “a place where people want us,” Yang writes, but after Dad insists “America is your home,” Nou contemplates the word’s real meaning for “my people,” who “have no country.” And family discussions about places of belonging (Dad’s in his songs, and Mom’s in her garden) leave the child firming up their own definition (“A place where I am accepted”) and creating a kind of home in the notebooks they keep. Visually expressing the story’s emotional shifts in digital, largely shadowless illustrations that mimic graphite, pastels, and watercolor, Kim renders tumult in dense scribbles that morph into sketchbook-like renderings as Nou builds a home, and returns to serenity, by drawing and writing. Author and illustrator notes and a Hmong glossary conclude. Background characters are portrayed with various skin tones. Ages 5–10. (Feb.)