Stay for Dinner

Judges' comments

Stay for Dinner is an exuberant, captivating celebration of family and friends and the fabulous feasts between them. Reshma loves ‘squishing splashy curry through layers of rice’ with her hands during dinnertime with her loving family. But Reshma is self-conscious about what her friends would think of her family eating with their hands, licking food off their fingers and burping their appreciation at the table.

Scrumptious cuisines spill over the pages with Michelle Pereira’s delightful illustrations that evoke everyday suburban multi-culture in all its gloriously familiar details: playing sports with friends after school, staying back late and gathering around dinner tables laden with various cuisines and culinary rituals. What to eat? How to eat it? What will my friends think of what and how I eat?! There are so many ways Stay for Dinner can be used to spark conversations in families, classrooms, and over readers’ own dinner tables. Conversations about being adventurous with food, about trusting friends and embracing ourselves and each other without judgment, about the warmth, generosity, delightful quirks and chaos of multi-generational families, and about the moments to treasure between and among family and friends.

And while food and multiculturalism have long been fetishised as the domain of the ‘exotic’ and ‘other’, Stay for Dinner stands out as a work that masterfully avoids any such tropes. Instead, Sandhya Parappukkaran and Michelle Pereira present a gorgeous food and cultural safari for children that is as much about appreciating and embracing the diverse ways families share a meal together, as it is a reminder that differences are mutually enriching when they are encountered without hierarchy or judgment but rather acceptance and respect. The result is a story that will have you grinning from the first page and ravenous by the last!