Some days nobody at all drove down our little road. We lay on our backs in the middle of the road and stared at the blue sky. She just laughed and hugged me and said, 'You're the best little sister in the world!' I liked it when she said that, so I stopped crying. Somehow or other, Lynn got behind me and said, 'Boo!' and I cried some more. We weren't that far from our house, but I felt scared. Officially, I stayed all day with a lady from down the road, but unofficially, Lynn was the one who took care of me.Īfter Lynn ran into the field, I couldn't see anything but corn. When she wasn't in school, she stayed with me constantly. I felt a brief fear as Lynn disappeared into the cornstalks. Her long black hair disappeared into the corn as she chased the dog. A dirty gray dog ran out of the field near us, and then he ran back in. Fields of tall corn stretched into the distance wherever you looked. We were playing on the empty road near our house. I was almost five, and she was almost nine. For instance, one of my earliest memories is the day Lynn saved my life. I like to see how her memories were the same as mine, but also different. Today I keep her diary in a drawer next to my bed. I know a lot about when I was a little girl, because my sister used to keep a diary. I didn't care where she sent me, so long as Lynn came along. She was dismayed over how un-Japanese we were and vowed to send us to Japan one day. My mother said we were misusing the word you could not call a Kleenex kira-kira. Lynn told me that when I was a baby, she used to take me onto our empty road at night, where we would lie on our backs and look at the stars while she said over and over, 'Katie, say ' kira-kira, kira-kira.'' I loved that word! When I grew older, I used kira-kira to describe everything I liked: the beautiful blue sky puppies kittens butterflies colored Kleenex. Kira-kira means 'glittering' in Japanese. I pronounced it ka-a-ahhh, but she knew what I meant. My sister, Lynn, taught me my first word: kira-kira. Luminous in its persistence of love and hope, Kira-Kira is Cynthia Kadohata's stunning debut in middle-grade fiction. But when Lynn becomes desperately ill, and the whole family begins to fall apart, it is up to Katie to find a way to remind them all that there is always something glittering - kira-kira - in the future. And it's Lynn who, with her special way of viewing the world, teaches Katie to look beyond tomorrow. When Katie and her family move from a Japanese community in Iowa to the Deep South of Georgia, it's Lynn who explains to her why people stop them on the street to stare. The sea is kira-kira for the same reason.

The sky is kira-kira because its color is deep but see-through at the same time. That's how Katie Takeshima's sister, Lynn, makes everything seem. Kira-kira (kee' ra kee' ra): glittering shining A Japanese-American family struggles to build a new life in the Deep South of Georgia in this luminous novel, winner of the Newbery Medal.

Kira kira by cynthia kadohata