Sitti's Secrets

Mona visits her grandmother — her Sitti — in a Palestinian village. They don't speak the same language. They find each other anyway — through hands, through food, through the specific intimacy of two people who love each other across a gap that words can't bridge. Nye — a Palestinian American poet — wrote this picture book as a dispatch from inside the experience of diaspora childhood: the grandmother who stayed, the granddaughter who grew up elsewhere, the village that exists in both of them differently. Before Mona leaves, Sitti gives her a secret to carry back to the American president. The most tender Palestinian children's book in English and the one that puts a child's specific love at the center of a geography the news reduces to conflict.