Let Me Fix You a Plate: A Tale of Two Kitchens

A road trip leads to two different kitchens—and a shared kind of love—as a narrator, two sisters, and their parents visit their grandparents. After “hours and hours” of driving from their city home, the car arrives in the “cool, dark night” of rural West Virginia, where the children’s white paternal grandparents live. Mamaw serves them breakfast the next morning: “sausage sizzling in the skillet, blackberry jam on toast, and tractors on cups.” Three days later, the family heads to Florida and the children’s Latinx maternal grandparents: “Hay comidita adentro. Comense,” Abuela says; “There’s food inside. Come and eat.” In West Virginia, the quiet house holds only Mamaw and Papaw; in Florida, “aunts and cousins and uncles and neighbors talk over each other above my head” while eating tostones and arroz and flan. Lilly’s sharp eye notes the way the parents respond to being home (“my mom still laughing”) and to leaving it ( Daddy “missing... quiet mountain tops”). With clear, bighearted text and an expressive ink line drawing the variously shaped bodies of her characters, Lilly (Geraldine) pays tribute to familial richness across generations and cultures. Ages 4–8. (Sept.)