Have you met Amelia yet? She's in every issue of American Girl magazine, plus she has a video, several books, and a desktop at americangirl.com. So, if this is your first introduction to her, you can check her out. She is very creative, using both words and hand-drawn pictures to tell her stories. And she puts notes for you in her margins, like the kind you pass to your friends in school.

In AMELIA LENDS A HAND, Amelia meets her new neighbor, a cool boy who shoots rockets into the air. Amelia wants to take her rocket over and play with him. So she calls to him and asks if she can. He ignores her. Amelia wonders if he's rude or if he doesn't like girls. Then she finds out he's deaf.

Amelia is determined to be friends with him, but how can she talk to him? How can she even catch his attention if she can't go into his yard to ask him if she can come into his yard? She solves that. She flies a paper airplane over to him that says "Open me."

His name is Enzo, and he has a little brother named Carlo. Carlo has to help them understand each other at first, but Amelia wants to learn sign language. She also wants to help Enzo understand things that maybe deaf people don't know. Like what sounds are like. She makes a dictionary of sounds for him, drawing pictures and telling him how sounds feel or smell or taste. A cat purring, for example, sounds like "how it feels to wear a shirt warm from the dryer." Someone snoring "sounds like how dirty socks smell." Can you imagine how you'd describe the sound of a ringing phone, or a rubber ducky, or a hiccup?

AMELIA LENDS A HAND includes 32 flash cards you can pull out to learn American Sign Language (ASL). And Amelia draws pictures for you of other signs, like the sign for "Cool!"

If you've never met Amelia before, this book will be a great introduction to her and her family. You will love learning how to communicate with deaf people and about ASL, which is another language just like Spanish or French or Russian. Instead of spoken words it uses the hands, face, and the whole body. And it's fun to learn. If you read this book, you and Amelia can learn together.

   --- Reviewed by Tamara Penny