LEROY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY

Can a plant-loving spirit manage to make a human friend?

Leroy the ghost—the white, diaphanous kind, but with a sun hat—tends the plants in an abandoned greenhouse attached to Rosebud Manor. Typically, the families who move into the manor are unreceptive to his friendship overtures: Leroy, who can’t speak, has tried waving a yellow rose, but “no one seem[s] to speak the language of flowers,” and the freaked-out humans inevitably move away. The arrival of a new family (two moms and their children, Tara and Hadar) fills Leroy with hope. Like him, they are plant lovers. But when the family spots him, only Tara, who, like Leroy, doesn’t speak verbally, is unafraid. She recognizes Leroy’s yellow rose as “a symbol of friendship” and shows him how he can use her tablet to communicate. (An author’s note directed at young readers discusses Augmentative and Alternative Communication.) Rosenthal’s first picture book twines Leroy’s and Tara’s respective communication challenges without being heavy-handed; Tara’s helpfulness, not her disability, is the emphasis here. Thai’s subdued, digitally finished graphite-pencil art, which is suitably awash in garden greens and earth tones, matches this feelings-focused story’s tenderness. One of the mothers is pale-skinned, as is Tara, while the other, like Hadar, is brown-skinned. Language suggests the family is Jewish.

A tale of kindness and bridged connections.