A Map into the World

This story is told entirely from the perspective of Paj Ntaub, a young Hmong American girl who moves into a new house with her family. They have elderly neighbors, Bob and Ruth, who seem friendly. Soon Paj Ntaub’s mother gives birth to twin boys. The boys grow, the seasons change, and so does the situation with the neighbors. Paj Ntaub comments on all of it, showing how change and love and loss are all filtered through the mind of a child. Illustrator Seo Kim limns Paj Ntaub’s world with a lovely technique that combines digital graphite, pastels, watercolor, and scanned handmade textures.

Read at the Carle Museum

A young Hmong-American girl moves into a new house with her pregnant mother, father, and grandmother; their neighbors are an elderly white couple, Bob and Ruth. Over the course of a year, the seasons change: summer brings the birth of twin baby boys, and winter brings Ruth's death. The girl and her family go over to Bob's house and the girl asks to chalk his driveway, drawing "A map into the world. Just in case you need it" to help her grieving neighbor.

A heart-wrenching story of intergenerational, cross-cultural friendship.

Illustrations created digitally with digital graphite, pastels, watercolors, and scanned handmade textures. Endpapers show the special "story cloth" showing how the Hmong got to America that show more Paj Ntaub hangs with her grandmother, Tais Tais show less

This was such a gentle and beautiful book about being part of a family and a community. The illustrations are amazing and the text is thoughtful and authentic.

This book is about a little girl who experiences gardening with her grandmother when her little brothers are babies, and drawing for her neighbor when his wife passes away. This book has beautiful illustrations and would be great for incorporating families with a diverse culture and history into the classroom. This book would be appropriate for intermediate readers.

It was a fine book and a sweet story but it made me cry and I was expecting something different. I wouldn't be able to read it out loud without crying so I'm not sure I'd want to read it again.

The illustrations in this book are wonderful and fully embrace the joys that this book can bring.

Inter-generational friendship. Also immigration.
If you choose to share this with your child, be ready to spend some time learning together about how it feels to move to a new country and home, what a story cloth is, how to welcome new life, how to say goodbye, etc.

I'd like to learn from a child what it felt like for this girl not to be allowed or able to do much with her baby brothers, always hearing 'no, you're too young' or 'no, they're too young.'