Grandma Lives in a Perfume Village just won a Mildred L. Batchelder Award for an outstanding children’s book translated from a foreign language and subsequently published in the United States. I missed it when it came out in May, but I obsessively order in award winners and this one truly is striking. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s done in watercolor and pencil and something about this style normally makes things feel decades old to me, but it didn’t seem to age this story. Fang Suzhen’s story is definitely one that could take place anytime since trains were invented, but Sonja Danowski’s little touches in the spreads allow kids to pick out things from their every day life. There’s a little handmade ghost hanging on the curtain on the front cover and any kid would want the truck Xiao Le shows her. There are tons of tiny details like those that kids will see themselves mirrored in and that’s great because for a lot of us, this is a different culture. Seeing how similar our lives are to those different than us is one of the easiest ways to stop people from being ‘other’ and just being people. 

At its heart this is a story about caring and a little boy doing his best to not be scared of someone new. It seems Xiao Le takes care of his grandma in his best impersonation of his mom, doing whatever he can as a small child to make her feel better. The middle shows the heartened grandmother teaching Xiao Le the same game she played with his mother, pulling apart wild sorrel. This is an easy activity for kids in the spring, easily replacing sorrel (which is everywhere, btw) with clover or even grass.