Many Things at Once

In this poignant picture book about family and belonging, the child of a Jewish mother and a South Asian father hears stories about her family history. Sometimes she doesn’t feel Jewish enough or South Asian enough, but comes to realize you can feel--and be--many things at once.

Based on the author’s own family history, here is a moving story about a young girl from two different backgrounds. The girl’s mother tells her stories about her mother, a Jewish seamstress in Brooklyn, New York. She lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment and sewed wedding dresses shimmering in satin and lace.

Her father tells stories of his mother, the girl’s other grandmother, who liked to cook bubbling dal on a coal stove in Pakistan. They tell stories about how both sides came to America, and how, eventually, her parents met on a warm summer evening in Poughkeepsie.

The girl sometimes feels as if she’s the ＂only one like me.＂ One day, when she spots a butterfly in her yard, she realizes it’s okay to be different--no two butterflies are alike, after all. It’s okay to feel alone sometimes, but also happy and proud. It’s okay to feel-- and be-- many things at once.

Veera Hiranandani, author of the Newbery Honor-winning The Night Diary, earned her MFA in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of The Whole Story of Half a Girl, a Sydney Taylor Notable Book and a South Asia Book Award finalist, and How to Find What You’re Not Looking For, winner of the Sydney Taylor Book Award and the New York Historical Society Children’s History Book Prize. A former editor at Simon & Schuster, she now teaches in the Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA Program at The Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Nadia Alam is a second-generation Bangladeshi Canadian illustrator. She is the illustrator of Awake, Asleep by Kyle Lukoff, which received three starred reviews, and The Wishing Machine by Jonathan Hillman, called ＂beautifully heartbreaking and heartening＂ in a starred review from Booklist. She lives in Toronto with her husband, daughter, son, and dog named Momo.