In the pampas of Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, a young girl, Clara, helps her mother wash and deliver laundry for the wealthier families of their village. One day, her mother tells her to “Take these clothes to the man in the big house.” The mother warns her not to get distracted, to leave the clothes outside and collect the money the man has left under the mat. But Clara, who writes words in the dirt with a stick while her mother is working, begins a conversation with the man. She is fascinated by the books in his window and by the fact that he never steps outside. One day, he leaves a book under the mat for her. On her next trip to his house, she goes inside and talks with him about the book he gave her, a collection of fairy tales. Then she asks him again why he never goes outside, and he tells her about a man whom he once loved, but he “didn’t have the courage to go with him.” When he explains what courage is, Clara, inspired, finds a way to bring the man outside into “the light.”

The spare text leaves ample room for illustrations to co-narrrate the story, from the a spread of the girl making letters with a stick to her shadow-like outline as she watches the birds and later reads the books she’s borrowed while making her laundry delivery rounds. They show as well the passage of time as she matures both as a reader and as a friend to the man. Readers imagine the relationship between the dreamy protagonist and her practical, hardscrabble mother, as well as with the absent grandmother who taught her to read and in this way fed her dreams. The entire story has the feel of a fairy tale, one that parallels the fairy tale that the man has gifted her and she has taken to heart. The illustrations’ muted color palette gives the sense of a past era, when the author’s own mother was a child in a remote Argentinian village where, according to the dedication, “she discovered books” and her friend Juan discovered “the light of day.”

Clara and the Man With Books in His Window

María Teresa Andreutto; illustrated by Martina Trach

Translated from Spanish by Elisa Amado

Greystone Kids, 2025

ISBN 978-1-777840-251-7 (cl)

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Lyn Miller-Lachmann is the author of the YA historical novel Torch (Carolrhoda Lab, 2022), winner of the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature and a 2022 Booklist Editors’ Choice, and the YA verse novel Eyes Open (Carolrhoda Lab 2024), chosen by Booklist as a Top 10 Historical Fiction for Youth, 2024. She wrote the picture book Ways to Play (Levine Querido, 2023), illustrated by Gabriel Alborozo, and co-authored with Zetta Elliott the middle grade verse novel Moonwalking (FSG, 2022). Her nonfiction includes a biography of Temple Grandin in the She Persisted chapter book series from Philomel and Film Makers: 15 Groundbreaking Women Directors (co-authored with Tanisia “Tee” Moore) from Chicago Review Press. She translates books for youth from Portuguese to English, including the 2023 YA graphic novel Pardalita by Joana Estrela, published by Levine Querido, which was named a Batchelder Honor Book in 2024, and the graphic novel Our Beautiful Darkness (Enchanted Lion), by the Angolan author Ondjaki, illustrated by António Jorge Gonçalves.