Description
In the Children’s Translated Fiction Duo
The Girl Who Learned All the Languages of the World (2019), story by Ieva Flamingo with illustrations by Chein Shyan Lee. Meet Lela – a clever little girl who is also very stubborn. Despite her mum and dad encouraging her to learn a new language, Lela refuses, arguing that dogs don’t try to neigh. This leaves her in a bit of a pickle at an important international party where she can’t understand anything the grown-ups are saying and feels utterly miserable. Lela vows from this moment on to learn all of the languages of the world, one word at a time… Join Lela on her journey, learning words in Latvian, French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Italian, Estonian, Swedish, Slovenian, Dutch, Maltese and Russian. Filled with humour, adventure and learning, this delightful book will leave you wanting to learn more and more languages. A deluxe paperback book with colour illustrations.
“In the meantime, the waiters had served roast potatoes, meat, fish and salad. Everyone was helping themselves, piling their plates high with everything they fancied. Lela did the same. Then, they all started talking again. And once again… Lela couldn’t understand a word.”
Page count: 96 | Publication date: 24 Jan 2019 | Paperback ISBN: 9781912915095
The Adventures of Na Willa (2019), by Reda Gaudiamo, with illustrations by Cecillia Hidayat, and translated from Indonesian by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi Degoul and Kate Wakeling. Na Willa is a bright, adventurous girl living in Surabaya’s suburbs, her home in the middle of an alley surrounded by cypress trees. She spends her days running after trains with Dul (she always beats him), going down to the market with Mak, and thinking about how people can sing through radios. But while everyone else tells Na Willa what to do and who to be, Na Willa wants to be free. She doesn’t want to be “just” a girl, she doesn’t want to look just like Pak, or just Mak. She wants to be both and more. Indonesian author Reda Gaudiamo has created a collection of stories of curious adventures and musings of a multicultural girl growing up in Indonesia with an East Indonesian mother and a Chinese-Indonesian father. Set in a time when children spent the day outside, listening to Lilis Suryani’s songs on the radio, and when race and gender would still go undiscussed, this is Na Willa’s story as she grows up unafraid to ask the big questions.
“Cik Mien sells all sorts of groceries. There’s rice, kecap, and butter in a can with pictures of coconut trees on it. There’s soap wrapped with brown paper with bees drawn on it. There’s also a soap in the shape of a brick with two shaking hands drawn on it. I really really really do not like the way that this soap smells.
Mak says I mustn’t ask for anything. If Cik Mien is eating tiwul she’ll give me a bit of tiwul on a little plate. But I prefer grontol – boiled corn sprinkled with coconut – with a little bit of salt and sugar. But of all the food and drink she gives me, my absolute favourite is a special drink in a bottle which is labelled as ‘Orange Cruz’, which Cik Mien says like this: ‘oranyekrus’. It tastes sweet and sour and then there’s also another sensation that fizzes on my tongue.”
Page count: 96 | Publication date: 12 March 2019 | Paperback ISBN: 9781910139592
