By Meghan Cox Gurdon
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The chattering, churning, whirling waters of Jordan Scott’s autobiographical picture book “I Talk Like a River” (Holiday House, 40 pages, $18.99) exist both inside and outside its young narrator, a boy who suffers from a debilitating stutter. “At school, I hide in the back of the class. I hope I don’t have to talk,” he tells us. “When my teacher asks me a question, all my classmates turn and look.” In sublime and poignant paintings, Sydney Smith shows the child’s struggle, his misery and shame—and then the glorious, sun-dappled afternoon when his father uses an example from nature to transform the boy’s understanding of himself: “I talk like a river.”