My Name Is Sangoel by Karen Lynn Williams

The news leaves his best friend, narrator “Dougo,” devastated…particularly as Harry doesn’t seem all that fussed about it. Having, as Kline notes in her warm valedictory acknowledgements, taken 30 years to get through second and third grade, Harry Spooger is overdue to move on-but not just into fourth grade, it turns out, as his family is moving to another town as soon as the school year ends. 7-9)Ī long-running series reaches its closing chapters. Though a skinny eight-year-old with downcast eyes, Sangoel is such a picture of quiet dignity that readers will come away admiring his courage and self-possession.

Stock uses transparent colors and thick brushwork to give her tableaux a sense of movement, capturing the apprehension of Sangoel and his family as they travel from a spare, dusty refugee camp to a crowded and snowy American city. His delighted classmates follow suit by turning their own names into rebuses. Rejecting his mother’s suggestion that he should perhaps take an American name, he instead goes to school the next day wearing a shirt on which he’s written “My Name Is,” followed by pictures of a sun and a soccer goal. Sangoel arrives in the United States with little beyond his mother, his little sister and his Dinka name-which everyone he meets stumbles over and usually mispronounces. The authors of Four Feet, Two Sandals (2007, illustrated by Doug Chayka) craft another sensitively written, hope-filled immigrant story, this one featuring a young Sudanese refugee who finds an inventive way to break the ice in his new American school.

My Name Is Sangoel by Karen Lynn Williams