Written with precision, lyricism and compassion, I Talk Like a River is a story about stuttering drawn from author Jordan Scott's personal experience.

A boy is ashamed of his efforts to produce words and the resultant facial contortions: "All they see," he says, referring to his classmates, "is how strange my face looks and that I can't hide how scared I am." The boy's father recognizes that his son has had a "bad speech day" and takes him to a place where they can be quiet. At the river, the pair watches the water as it churns yet is "calm . . . beyond the rapids." Pulling his son close, the father points to the water. "That's how you speak," he says.

Illustrator Sydney Smith (Town Is by the Sea, Small in the City) uses thick, impressionistic brushstrokes that dazzle as he represents the boy's roiling interior world. In one gripping spread about the boy's fear of public speaking, we see the classroom from his point of view. Students stare, their faces indistinct smudges of paint, the entire room distorted by the boy's panic. But at the river—where Smith showcases the mesmerizing play of light on water in a dramatic double gatefold—the world becomes clearer.

Smith also plays visually with some of the book's figurative language. The boy cites elements from nature as examples of the letters he finds most challenging to pronounce (P, C and M). Smith incorporates them into a striking spread in which pine tree branches, a shrieking crow and the outline of a crescent moon cover the boy's face.

Without providing pat answers or resorting to sentimentality, I Talk Like a River reverently acknowledges the boy's hardship. Scott's story is as much about observant, loving parenting as it is about the struggle to speak fluently, as the boy's father generously equips his son with a metaphorical framework to understand and even take pride in his stutter: "My dad says I talk like a river." This is unquestionably one of the best picture books of 2020.

Sometimes a few words can transform a child's life. In this autobiographical story by Canadian poet Scott (Night & Ox, for adults), a boy who stutters is given a new way to think about his speech. He describes words in his mouth and the anguish of his classroom: "All those eyes watching/ my lips/ twist and twirl,/ all those mouths/ giggling/ and laughing." One "bad speech day," his father picks him up from school and takes him to the quiet river, where they look for rocks and sit on the bank. "See how that water moves? That's how you speak," his father says. Following frustration-tinged spreads, Smith (Small in the City) zooms in on the boy's face as he watches the river "bubbling, churning, whirling, and crashing." He closes his eyes, taking in the words' meaning, then ventures into the water, shown in a shimmering double gatefold. "This is what I like to remember,/ to help stop myself from crying/ I talk like a river." Artwork makes the internal change a light-filled experience, an account of the moment in which the child experiences himself and his individual way of speaking as part of the great forces of the natural world. Ages 4–8. Author's agent: Hilary McMahon, Westwood Creative Artists. Illustrator's agent: Emily Van Beek, Folio Jr./Folio Literary Management. (Sept.)

Gr 1–4—In first-person narration about the author as a boy, this debut brings readers into the world of dysfluency, that is, stuttering. The narrator, a white boy, sits alone at the kitchen table before school, imagining how badly his day will go, and it's even worse. The letters M, P, and C bring special terrors for the garbled sounds they demand of him in a school day, when the teacher asks students to describe a favorite place. His solitude is, for readers, almost unbearable until he returns to his understanding father. He knows about a "bad speech day," and takes his son to the river. There, without many words, he explains how his son talks like the river, with ebbs and flows, a rush of sounds, emotion, and meaning streaming. The boy's dawning realization brings the story to a resonant pause, in a foldout that opens to a vast four-page spread of the sparkling waters that surround him. And then the remembrance resumes, for when he returns to school, he talks about his special place in his own manner, his dysfluency making him and his telling unique. Smith's lyrical, color-saturated paintings capture mighty nature as well as the blurred, staring faces of schoolmates, who mock and laugh but mostly do not understand the main character's inner world. An author's note, in tiny type but very personal and expressive, outlines the journey Scott has taken to make peace with himself. VERDICT By turns heartbreaking and illuminating, this picture book brings one more outsider into the fold through economy of language and an abundance of love.—Kimberly Olson Fakih, School Library Journal