American Desi

In rhyming text, Rajan Gopal’s picture book debut smartly explores the duality of one child’s bicultural American and Indian identity. Energetic mixed-media collage art by Kelkar (Bindu’s Bindis) makes good use of each spread’s layout, showing the child narrator comfortably straddling two worlds—one visualized on either side of the book’s gutter. On the verso, the child, portrayed with spectacles and long black hair, is shown barefoot in a temple (“Flowers, incense fill the air”) and, on the recto, sneaker-clad on swings (“Wearing shoes without a care”). Other spreads compare and contrast watching cricket and American football, and executing both “Bollywood moves” and “hip-hop grooves,” among other experiences. Though each double image ends with a probing either/or question—“Which is the color of me?”—the initially disparate-seeming experiences build to a moment of cohesion as the child pulls the threads of varying garments into their hands: “Gathering, holding in my hands/ The different colors of me.” Following this moment, fabrics, foods, and languages (“Hindi, Tamil twirl and swirl/ English drawls and twangs and flares”) appear together on the page, twining layers of identity as the protagonist declares themself: “Blending, merging, taking wing/ The glorious colors of me.” Ages 4–8. (June)