MEENA LOST AND FOUND

Nine-year-old Meena practices being good at friendship even when her friends want something she doesn’t.

Meena loves the Finders Keepers Club and the way they share treasures. Her cousin Eli shows off cool plants; her best friend, Sofía, describes the birds she’s seen; and Meena reveals treasures she’s found in the trash. But she doesn’t understand why Sofía and Eli aren’t excited about the same things she is. Don’t they want to build clubhouses out of recycling with her? Meena knows she’s supposed to listen to what her friends actually want, but that’s so hard. Sofía, a brown-skinned bilingual girl in a Spanish-speaking family, has real problems: Her cat is missing, her dad’s lost his farming job, and she might have to move to California. As Meena grows ever more jealous and angry about her friends’ distraction, she responds by collecting more and more trash—until her mother, concerned about hoarding, stages an intervention. Meena, illustrated as White along with the rest of her family, has epilepsy, beautifully represented as just another aspect of her life; she takes medication and knows it would be mean to prank her parents with a fake seizure, but her worries are about her garbage treasures and Sofía, not her seizures. All Spanish is italicized.

Genuinely compassionate about finding empathy for others in the face of one’s own sadness.