The Most Perfect Persimmon: A Young Reader’s Delight

I have never eaten a persimmon. It sounds more like an adjective than a fruit to me. The students felt quite persimmon when they realized the difficulty of the test. The Most Perfect Persimmon is an illustrated book that’s a love letter to family, patience, creature comforts and the fleeting search for perfection. That last bit might be too esoteric, but the nature of the young girl in the book and the brief period that a persimmon is perfect brings about comparisons to avocados.

The Most Perfect Persimmon follows a young girl who is eagerly awaiting her grandmother’s visit. They have a persimmon tree in their back yard and the girl steadfastly looks over the fruit and takes care of the tree. She waters it, puts a blanket around the trunk when it’s cool, and is super excited when the fruit is finally ready to be plucked from its branches. With the ready-to-eat persimmons in the kitchen, the only thing missing is Grandma, but she’s not arriving until next weekend.

Her mood turns from happy to frustrated as the days tick by and she realizes that the fruit has become too soft and spoiled. When her grandmother arrives, she’s despondent she doesn’t have any fruit to share, until her grandmother lets her in on the secret that if you turn the spoiled fruit upside-down and then peel it, it’s still quite delicious. This version of the fruit is called a hongshi, and her grandmother explains that it’s even more of a delicacy than the persimmon that she had grown to love.

Even if your young audience has no familiarity with the persimmon they’ll find The Most Perfect Persimmon a very cute book. The text is made up of simple sentences that are too difficult for story-time audiences to read on their own, but are short enough for them to memorize or make out simpler sight words. They’re also given lots of space. On the rare page that has more than one sentence they are spaced out so as to not intimidate young readers.

There’s an infectious sense of optimism and happiness in the book. Even when the girl hits one of her two low points, readers know that somehow it will get better for her. The family bond that the characters enjoy are some of the traits that cross over to anyone, anywhere. The author’s note at the end of Persimmon lets readers in on the fact that it’s biographical and inspired from her time in South Korea when her grandmother had a tree in her yard.

The Most Perfect Persimmon will naturally lead to stories that young, story-time audiences will share with other. Some of the kids will talk about when they tried a kiwi for the first time, the smart kid in the corner might comment that it originally came from New Zealand and another one is racking their brain to replace the exotic food that was just stated. This will lead to one of them talking about a ritual that they have with their family and how it makes them feel. It’s a book about commonalities and the ways that individuals celebrate them. Persimmon won’t be the favorite one that they’ll clamor for, but it’s a unique addition to a library that’ll add flavor that most kids don’t see.

The Most Perfect Persimmon is by Hannah Chung and is available on Astra Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

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