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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tenderberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today, there's a writer who I've been talking to since his very first book. His name is Juno Diaz, and we're always thrilled

when at the variance of time of a comet, he comes streaking through Los Angeles and makes it

a point, a generous point, to visit us here at KCRW. 20 years ago, approximately, he promised his goddaughters to write a book in which they

would be characters. And the result has come only now, 20 years later, in the form of, to my mind, a devastatingly beautiful and moving

children's book called Island Born.

It's officially for ages four to eight, but it's the kind of children's book I find.

Every time I go through it, I see a new joke, a new detail, a little perfection that makes

the book readable again and again.

Now, I assume that any child in an American classroom who was born outside America

is feeling a certain kind of anxiety about the others in the room.

They may not be born in America either,

but they're having to make a home for themselves. And this book is about a little girl

who makes a home for herself, not in the Dominican Republic of her family, but in their

imagination of the place and her imagination of the place.

And what's ingenious about this book is that the pictures see the world through her eyes.

She's seeing her family's imaginary island, and she's bringing it back to school.

...