It's a lonely thing to be, like Rosa, the best reader in your second grade class. You have to wait while the others make their way through the same simple passage time after time. Worse, the others think you are stuck-up and don't want to play with you. It's probably even worse to be the worst reader in your first grade class like her cousin, Max, so afraid of his inability to handle the strange language that he hears, that he hardly talks at all. It's not easy to be Rosa's father either, loving them both and trying to help them both, at the same time that he must retrain himself to be able to hold a better job. He feels the 'education system' has failed him and he is convinced that the 'help' it is trying to offer the children can only make things much worse for both of them. Books cannot cure the loneliness, but they can take away a lot of its pain. Rosa finds people in books who are much like herself. Some of them lived long ago and far away, but they help her understand herself, they enrich her language, and they fill her mind with excitement and mystery. She learns to enjoy a friendship with a neighbor girl who is not much like her, but who is an honest ally and possesses a talent she admires. When Rosa finds Harry, the loneliness goes away. Life is exciting at last. Harry brings her new ideas, new ambitions, a wealth of new books to read and questions to wonder about. The longing that she feels when Harry has to leave is not the empty loneliness of a child. She knows that there are people like her and that she may have something to offer them.