Although she’s just a kid, Cecilia has two full-time jobs: elementary school student, and interpreter for her Spanish-speaking parents.
In her picture book debut, The Interpreter, Olivia Abtahi (Twin Flames) has crafted an empathetic, gently humorous look at what it’s like to be a go-to translator in immigrant and/or multilingual families. Fittingly, The Interpreter is itself a multilingual book: cleverly conceived watercolor and pencil-crayon artwork by Monica Arnaldo (The Museum of Very Bad Smells) separates out languages by color. Orange word bubbles are for Spanish, blue for English and pink for Farsi when Cecilia’s family encounters another kid-interpreter.
Cecilia’s life has become overwhelmingly blue and orange, to her and her friends’ consternation. She’s a plucky, considerate child who beams when her mom says, “What would I do without you?” But while it’s rewarding to explain her sibling’s medical treatments, ensure the hairdresser doesn’t cut mom’s hair too short, and assist dad with his driver’s license photo (“No smiling. / Sin sonrisa.”), it’s also exhausting.
Not surprisingly, when a perceptive teacher inquires how she—just her, not her family—is doing, Cecilia loses her cool and releases her bottled-up frustration in a gloriously explosive double-page-spread: “I don’t want to run errands every day and wait at the DMV! I want to be outside, I want to play soccer . . . I want, I want, I want.” Her parents are shocked at her outburst, and then shocked at how Cecilia’s calendar has been overtaken by interpreting without their realizing. “I want to help,” Cecilia says,. “just not all the time.”
Abtahi does a stellar job of introducing the concepts of boundaries, self-advocacy and work-life balance while cautioning readers that being super-accommodating might result in being taken advantage of or overburdened, even by those who care about us. But asking for and accepting help can make things better for all involved: By the book’s happy end, Cecilia’s aunt and brother are pitching in with interpreting, she’s back to playing with friends and everybody is smiling—especially Cecilia.
