I Talk Like a River named one of the year’s best children’s books by The Wall Street Journal

By Meghan Cox Gurdon
Read the whole list on wsj.com

The chattering, churning, whirling waters of Jordan Scott’s autobiographical picture book “I Talk Like a River” (Holiday House, 40 pages, $18.99) exist both inside and outside its young narrator, a boy who suffers from a debilitating stutter. “At school, I hide in the back of the class. I hope I don’t have to talk,” he tells us. “When my teacher asks me a question, all my classmates turn and look.” In sublime and poignant paintings, Sydney Smith shows the child’s struggle, his misery and shame—and then the glorious, sun-dappled afternoon when his father uses an example from nature to transform the boy’s understanding of himself: “I talk like a river.”