ALA Booklist (Thu Aug 04 00:00:00 CDT 2022)

In the South Asian diaspora, the term desi applies to people connected to the countries and cultures of the Indian subcontinent. It is a harmless label that loosely translates to "from the land." This captures the duality of a child who has strong claims to her Indian heritage and equally strong ties to the culture she is absorbing in the U.S. Each spread juxtaposes cultural elements that she values: Bollywood dance and hip-hop; cricket matches on TV and baseball games at the park; Hindi, Tamil, and English languages. Rather than the conventional tension we see in many books about bicultural people, this wields a more inquisitive tone. The girl is seeking a cultural balance that incorporates the various aspects of her identity, and she finds it in the people around her. Sumptuous illustrations formed by collages of textured and printed fabrics provide the visual metaphor for the many threads that weave together harmoniously in the girl's community, depicting beauty in what would otherwise seem like an incongruous combination of colors and textures.

Horn Book (Thu Oct 03 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

A young American desi (someone of South Asian descent living elsewhere) compares the disparate parts of her own cultural makeup. "Pavadais in bright gold colors / Jersey shirts and faded jeans / Swapping, changing, feeling seen... / Which is the color of me?" While the child's voice is initially curious, there's never any hint of self-consciousness, and the tone becomes proud and grateful. The gently rhyming text uses a dynamic refrain ("Finding the sounds of me," "Blending the flavors of me," etc.) to empower cultural identities of all kinds; Kelkar's rich collages, a potpourri of paper, fabric, and other media, are wonderfully suited to this celebration of "blending, merging, taking wing..."

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

In rhyming text, Rajan Gopal’s picture book debut smartly explores the duality of one child’s bicultural American and Indian identity. Energetic mixed-media collage art by Kelkar (Bindu’s Bindis) makes good use of each spread’s layout, showing the child narrator comfortably straddling two worlds—one visualized on either side of the book’s gutter. On the verso, the child, portrayed with spectacles and long black hair, is shown barefoot in a temple (“Flowers, incense fill the air”) and, on the recto, sneaker-clad on swings (“Wearing shoes without a care”). Other spreads compare and contrast watching cricket and American football, and executing both “Bollywood moves” and “hip-hop grooves,” among other experiences. Though each double image ends with a probing either/or question—“Which is the color of me?”—the initially disparate-seeming experiences build to a moment of cohesion as the child pulls the threads of varying garments into their hands: “Gathering, holding in my hands/ The different colors of me.” Following this moment, fabrics, foods, and languages (“Hindi, Tamil twirl and swirl/ English drawls and twangs and flares”) appear together on the page, twining layers of identity as the protagonist declares themself: “Blending, merging, taking wing/ The glorious colors of me.” Ages 4–8. (June)