Quiet Karima
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Even if you’re quiet, you can still be loud!
Without silence, there is no music.
Karima is quiet. She’d prefer to listen to the world than to talk. In fact, she listens to the chirps, thuds, and squeaks all around her, and in everything she hears a melody or a beat. As she journeys to her music class, she soaks up all the sounds along the way, until she is ready to perform a song that is uniquely her own.
Celebrated author of Pashmina Nidhi Chanani has created a lyrical celebration of introverts everywhere as Quiet Karima shows there are many ways to use your voice.
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Simple, line-style ink, watercolor, and colored pencil drawings introduce a child, portrayed with brown skin, who prefers listening to talking. For "Quiet Karima," "my ears seek/ rhythm and beat": sound-forward text describes the "tk tk tk" of "my mama/ making rotis/ in a one-two tempo," and the shutting door and jingling of keys that occur around leaving the apartment. In first-person narration, the figure wanders through a park to a favorite place, the music store, where Mrs. T accepts Karima's quiet: "Without silence, there's no music." Karima and Mrs. T use objects that Karima's brought ("a box, a can, a pair of chopsticks") to "tap and crash,/ groove and bash." Chanani (the Shark Princess series) draws the two as they experiment with sound, then play drums together. Streams of color emerge from Karima's: "I'm an instrument,/ my heart, my body,/ part of the/ world's melody." In a world where the protagonist's quiet can feel like something that sets them apart, Karima finds a place to engage in both listening and expression. Background characters are portrayed with various skin tones. Ages 3–7.
