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Wendy's Comments: Yasou Nikki
 Wendy's Comments:
When I was five my Anglo-Canadian family moved to a village in France, and I
started kindergarten without speaking a word of the language. However, the
first morning I met a girl named Jacqueline in the sandbox - who taught me
to speak French just as, in the story, she teaches Nikoletta to speak
English. (The real Jacqueline, by the way, grew up to be a teacher of
children with special needs, so she obviously enjoyed the experience).
This is probably the most purely autobiographical of my books; even when
Nikoletta's father tries to teach her English, he falls back on my own
father's standbys: using what was in front of him - knife; fork, spoon. I'm
sure that he tried to teach me other things too, but all I can remember is
sitting at the dinner table repeating 'le couteau; la fourchette'. (Which
means, of course that I lied about not knowing a word of the language, but
for some reason, as far as I remember about that first day of kindergarten,
the subject of cutlery never came up.)
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