An intrepid girl discovers the value of the tangled, knotty side of life in Loose Threads , a picture book inspired by a Palestinian scarf, from Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award winner Isol. Translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel A New York Public Library Summer 2025 Pick for Kids! Selected for the USBBY Outstanding International Book List, 2025! A Bookstagang Best of 2024 Picture Book Selection, Future Classic! One of Evanston Public Library’s “101 Great Books for Kids List of 2024”! Leilah lives in an idyllic village, where everything has its place. It’s as beautiful and perfect as the scenes in her grandmother’s embroidery. But some believe that just on the flipside of this orderly village lies the Other Side—a messy and wild world, filled with merry inhabitants and strange beasts. Leilah often visits just such a place in her dreams. Leilah is constantly losing things, and when her mom demands an explanation, Leilah decides that her lost possessions must be falling down into the Other Side. And so, she declares that all she has to do to fix things is mend the holes between her world and the Other Side. It’s a genius idea—nothing will ever go missing again! But as Leilah soon learns, some holes don’t need sewing up, and mending can also mean a suffocating shutting out… Inspired by one of her favorite scarves, here Isol spins a tale that celebrates the different worlds that are all part of life’s rich tapestry. Selected for the USBBY Outstanding International Book List, 2025 A Bookstagang Best of 2024 Picture Book Selection, Future Classic One of Evanston Public Library’s “101 Great Books for Kids List of 2024” One of Betsy Bird's Caldenotts of 2024 Bookishly Delightful 's Best Picture Book in Translation of 2024 Selected for the Children Book Council’s Summer 2024 Showcase: Imagination Celebration “Existing alongside Leilah’s beautiful, orderly village is another, chaotic world called the Other Side... Inspired by a traditional hand-embroidered shawl that she received on a visit to Palestine, Isol’s eye-catching, unique illustrations feature photographs of its patterns; the outward-facing side is the backdrop to Leilah’s village, while the reverse sets the scene for the Other Side... [A] clever, playful tale... Whimsical and imaginative.”― Kirkus Reviews “Brilliantly realized, this is a charming, unusual fable of two worlds, each the reverse of the other but ever in balance.”― Booklist "An embroidered shawl’s underside represents an alternate realm in this inventive picture book... Celebrates the fascinating reverse side of intricate stitching patterns."― Publishers Weekly “The celebrated Argentine picture-book creator Isol presents 7- to 9-year-olds with parallel realms in Loose Threads , an illustrated story that plays out on either side of an embroidered cloth. On one side houses and flowers appear in neat stitching, while the obverse shows a mess of knots and dangling threads. On the tidy side lives a little girl named Leilah who’s forever losing things—keys, gloves, colored pencils… An affectionate coda, meanwhile, reveals that the dwellers on the fabric’s untidy side are indeed as fantastical as Leilah could hope and that they enjoy putting her ‘gifts’ to stylish use.”― Wall Street Journal “Inspired by the traditional embroidery of Palestinian culture, this ­Argentinian import honors unseen worlds. The mixed-media art relies primarily on highly textured and detailed embroidery to tell the tale… Isol depicts a world embroidered in red thread… Delightfully, she also depicts the back sides of these embroidered cloths to emphasize the ‘much stranger’ other world ‘just behind ours.’ She renders the startling, eye-catching forest with black threads, for example… A richly imagined tale told with loving care.”― Julie Danielson , The Horn Book One of Betsy Bird's Caldenotts of 2024! “A beautifully illustrated combination of needlework and hand-drawn characters. Honestly, we need a little more international flavor in our early chapter books, and this fascinating little fable fits the bill. It’s probably one of the most inventive little titles you’ll see this year, too. The art is this eclectic mix of embroidery and illustration, all based on a scarf Isol received from the Palestinian women she visited at the Tamer Institute in Palestine. It’s also a great little tale of a girl trying to solve problems that don’t need solving. Makes for a nice complement to other stories about letting a few gaps and mistakes exist in our world, and the problems of striving for perfectionism. Or maybe it’s about something else entirely. I’m not sure! All I know is that I love this book.”― Betsy Bird , A Fuse 8 Production (a School Library Journal blog) "The master is back with something wonderfully inventive up her sleeve. Combining drawing with textiles and embroidery, Isol makes a book that is stunning in both story and art."― Travis Jonker , 100 Scope Notes (a School Library Journal b