A child flips through book after book in her school library finding no one who looks like her, no families that resemble hers, no names that sound like hers, the absence communicating something that presence would not have to say, her existence apparently too peripheral to the human story to warrant inclusion in the stories humans tell, until one day she finds a book with a girl on the cover whose skin and hair and family configuration mirror her own and she reads it three times in a row, not because the plot is remarkable but because seeing herself reflected transforms something about what