How We Share Cake
by Kim Hyo-eun; illus. by the author; trans. from Korean by Deborah Smith
Preschool, Primary    Scribble    56 pp.
10/24    9781957363851    $19.95

In this clever, humorous Korean import, a young girl describes how she and her two brothers and two sisters share things fairly. Snacks are divided into five portions, rain boots are handed down from oldest to youngest, and when their uncle brings over a scooter, they divide up the allotted time to ride so that each gets exactly twenty-four minutes. Our protagonist goes first but crashes and hurts her arm, and while her four siblings look on with sympathy, at least one of the younger ones is quietly redoing the math, dividing scooter time by four instead of five. For once, the narrator doesn’t have to share—she has her parents all to herself on the trip to the hospital and even gets her own snack. Heading home with a cast on her arm, she’s allowed to pick whatever cake she wants: it’s her birthday! After imagining how much fun it would be to have a cake of her own, she ends up choosing one that’s easily shareable. Simply drawn characters—perfectly round heads, dots for eyes, lines for mouths—nimbly convey the wide range of emotions involved, because sharing can be easy (broccoli), hard (cotton candy), and sometimes smelly (the bathroom). A note at the front explains that the various Korean words used for one’s siblings depend on the speaker’s and addressee’s gender and position in the family.

From the ">January/February 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.