MALAIKA’S SURPRISE

Once again, Malaika’s life is changing, but Hohn and Luxbacher remain consistent in delivering an intimate and culturally rich picture book.

There’s a new girl in the neighborhood, and Malaika’s mother is pregnant, but readers first find Malaika and her stepsister, Adèle, dressed in familiar favorites—ornate masks and colorful capes—and ready for traditional West Indian carnival-inspired play. Like Malaika, readers will love the vibrant and glistening costumes that Luxbacher’s gouaches and pastels continue to enliven. Still, the blend of colors and found paper collage notably highlights the blended “brown and pink family” developing around Caribbean-born Malaika: her Afro-Caribbean mother, her White French-Canadian father, her rosy-cheeked White stepsister, and her soon-to-arrive biracial baby brother. In this third series outing, Hohn is firmly in her element, continuing the story of the little girl from the Caribbean acclimating to her new home in Canada, but the introduction of another little brown girl, Malayka M., who is also “from a far place” and whom our Malaika quickly befriends, explores new avenues of cultural and linguistic plurality. A brief glossary in the frontmatter provides an overview of key French, Caribbean, and Arabic terms readers will encounter throughout the story, which is endearingly narrated in Malaika’s own patois-inflected voice. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)

Newborn Émile surely surprises big sister Malaika, but the warm, culturally attuned storytelling here meets all expectations.