Geraldine Pu and her lucky pencil, too! by Maggie P. Chang

 We first met Geraldine Pu along with her favorite lunch box, she later returned with a cat hat, and now she has a lucky pencil. Geraldine is Taiwanese-American and deals with all the normal challenges of a grade schooler with the additional complications of her family heritage. In this adventure, she starts out listing some of the things she loves, including her family and stories - especially stories she makes up herself. To help her in writing and drawing, she has her lucky pencil, Chienbee, and together they've had many adventures. But when she gets an assignment at school to write a story about her family, she's not sure what to write and even Chienbee can't help her. There's nothing magical or special about her family - or is there? With the help of her Amah, she discovers her family does have lots of exciting and special stories and she proudly shares them with her classmates.

Geraldine Pu is one of Ready to Read's graphic early readers. It does have more complex vocabulary and sentence structure, and could easily be a crossover between an early reader and a beginning chapter book, but it also has a lot of devices to help the reader. There is an opening guide that explains how to read the comic panels, and a starting glossary explaining the Chinese words in the text, along with their pronunciation. The pronunciation is included again in the text itself when the words are used.

Ready to Read has an excellent selection of readers and comic readers, but Geraldine Pu stands out because of its smooth blending of everyday challenges and situations along with Geraldine's cultural heritage.

Verdict: An excellent choice for most public libraries and schools, this is a good title to add some diversity to the typical Fancy Nancy/Pinkalicious early readers, for transitioning readers who are interested in starting to read graphic novels, and would pair well with Capstone's series on kids from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Recommended.

ISBN: 9781534484740; Published August 2022 by Simon and Schuster; Review copy provided by publisher; Purchased for the library