Islandborn

Junot Díaz

Mar 2018 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

From New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz comes a debut picture book about the magic of memory and the infinite power of the imagination.

A 2019 Pura Belpré Honor Book for Illustration
 
Every kid in Lola's school was from somewhere else.
Hers was a school of faraway places.
 
So when Lola's teacher asks the students to draw a picture of where their families immigrated from, all the kids are excited. Except Lola. She can't remember The Island—she left when she was just a baby. But with the help of her family and friends, and their memories—joyous, fantastical, heartbreaking, and frightening—Lola's imagination takes her on an extraordinary journey back to The Island.  As she draws closer to the heart of her family's story, Lola comes to understand the truth of her abuela's words: “Just because you don't remember a place doesn't mean it's not in you.”
 
Gloriously illustrated and lyrically written, Islandborn is a celebration of creativity, diversity, and our imagination's boundless ability to connect us—to our families, to our past and to ourselves.

Ratings and reviews

Zoe & I read books together every day after school. She brings many home from school but we also order 2 books each month from Amazon to tease her reading level since she is dyslexic. I saw this book on her teacher's shelve the first day of school and so we ordered it right away. But Zoe waited to read it until she felt comfortable enough to try the words herself. Our only negatives in the book are the size of the text font and the color of the lettering itself make it difficult at times for those of us who have reading differences to pick up and just read the text. I am an adult with dyslexia and I struggled with the tiny white font. We love the bring illustrations on each page. While no where in the book does our author actually tell us what island is referred to in the book, we had fun guessing and then actually learning the nationality of the author. It is wonderful to find books that showcase people that look like my granddaughter and I am looking for more from author Junot Diaz and other Latinx authors.

What a beauty — from it's words, detailed imagery, and representation of diversity and Dominican life in NYC!

About the author

Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. A graduate of Rutgers University, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Leo Espinosa is an award-winning illustrator and designer from Bogotá, Colombia, whose work has been featured in The New Yorker, Wired, Esquire, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more. Leo's illustrations have been recognized by American Illustration, Communication Arts, Pictoplasma, 3x3, and the Society of Illustrators. Leo lives with his family in Salt Lake City, Utah.