Review of the Day: Goodbye, Koi by Jack Wong

Goodbye, Koi
By Jack Wong
Orchard Books (an imprint of Scholastic)
$19.99
ISBN: 978-1-338-83099-6
Ages 3-6
On shelves September 15th

There is, I feel compelled to tell you, a danger in plumbing your own personal history for a picture book. Personal histories can be exciting things. Think of Wishes by Mượn Thị Văn about escaping Vietnam, or the antics of Patricia Polacco’s terrible sibling in My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother. But it’s easy for memory to swerve too closely towards nostalgia. A little nostalgia is fine. It colors the book. But if you steep in it and make everything about “the good old days” then you’re not writing for a child reader anymore. You’re writing for their nostalgia-prone parents and grandparents. Ever see those influencers that kvetch online about how awful children’s books are today and then they show a whole heaping helping of whitey white books from mid-last century? They just love nostalgia. Lap it up with a spoon they do. All well and good, but it doesn’t make for great literature for kids today. That’s where Jack Wong does such a great job at getting Goodbye, Koi just right. This is a glimpse of the past, but the feeling isn’t that of looking through a halcyon lens at his childhood. It’s straightforward, interesting, and always has the child reader topmost in mind. Because a story about giving up your pet and then worrying about that pet’s emotions (and, by extension, your own) is a perfect way to use your history to tell a story to a kid today.

“Today, Dad and I took our koi to their new home.” With the help of an attendant, the two watch with interest as their koi are carefully moved from the large blue bin that has transported them, to a beautiful outdoor pond. When they leave, though, the boy can’t help but worry about the fish. Do they like seeing the sky above now? What’ll they do when the weather is bad? Will they get along with other fish? As these questions pile up and are answered by the boy’s patient father, the story flips between the two of them visiting with a large extended family, and the koi mixing with all the other fish in the pond. The two return to a home filled with boxes. Soon they too will be living in an all new home far away. They’ll miss the fish, but the boy feels ready for this new place to live, “under the big blue sky…” Backmatter discusses Jack Wong’s own immigration as a child, his newfound connection to Chinese brush painting for this book, and even a bit of info on koi fish as well.

As I alluded to before, there’s a sweet confluence that occurs when a picture book that’s personal to its creator also has the ability to connect with its young audience. For Jack Wong, he’s willing to tell a story based on his own experiences of leaving Hong Kong at the age of 6 to move to Canada. But when he made the choice to learn Chinese brush painting specifically for this story, he discovered that his mother had been an accomplished brush painter herself. That’s neat, but just because a book means something to its author/illustrator, that’s never a guarantee that it’ll have anything to say to its child audience. The magic of Goodbye, Koi is that it straddles the line perfectly. That’s thanks in large part to some of the choices Wong made along the way. The focus on the koi, a family pet, is key. Koi are probably the most personable of the fish, with their big, hungry, gaping mouths and sheer size. And what kid hasn’t worried about a pet’s feelings to the point where those feelings merge with their own?

When describing at the end of the book why he opted to make the human sections in the gongbi style (crisp and clear) and the koi in the xieyi style (which is softer and less distinct), Wong writes that the fish, “being within the boy’s mind, ought to be a little fuzzy.” That off-handed statement threw me for a real loop. Memory as drawn with a little fuzz. Surely SURELY I’ve seen that done before, but where? I started wracking my brain for books where people remember things. Historically, a lot of people will make memories look sepia-toned or they’ll play with the colors to distinguish the past from the present. But if I consider contemporary books, like The Blue House I Loved by Kao Kalia Yang, illustrated by Jen Shin, then I remember how memories in that book looks like a double exposures. Or what about this year’s Tom and Momo by Akiko Miyakoshi? The fuzziness in that book isn’t because of memory, but more because you’re often seeing the world through falling snowflakes. Wong’s choice to make the memories of the fish less clear than the present that the boy is living through is such a lovely and clever choice. It even extends to the cover of the book. There are the fish looking fuzzy in their tank, and there’s the boy, but if he’s fuzzy too then that’s because we’re viewing him through the water of the tank the way that the fish might. It reminds me of Sydney Smith’s incredible cover of Small in the City where you’re looking at the child character through glass (though in that case you’ve reflections to consider as well).

I was going to write a whole paragraph here about the one moment in the book when there’s this magnificent two-page silent spread of the boy and his father and their family members standing outside while the streets lights come on. But then, as I was paging through the book again, I realized that I was completely wrong. That is NOT the only moment when Wong includes silent two page spreads. The first is when the koi were dropped off in their new home and you have this beautiful watercolor of the red and yellow fish swimming together. That first spread didn’t even register with me for some reason. But in a way, that’s the goal, right? To make the art and the language so seamless that you hardly notice when the images pick up the slack while the words take a rest. Illustrators these days seem to have all kinds of options and abilities to forward the narrative at their fingertips. They can do gatefolds or use speech balloons and panels. Or they can do what Wong has done here and include two different kinds of artistic styles in a single book AND throw in the occasional silent spread. It’ll only work, though, if it serves the story in the best possible way. Not as a gimmick, but as a natural outgrowth of what the tale demands.

Kids worry. Kids fret. Kids project their feelings onto their pets and their imaginary friends and their nonverbal little siblings. What Wong does so beautifully with Goodbye, Koi is to take that projection and make it a palpable narrative, then split the visual narrative between the fish and the people who think about them. It’s so nice when a plan comes together, and howsoever Wong planned this book, there’s no denying that the end result is a rousing success. It eschews the point of view of an adult looking back at his past, and makes the story clear, contemporary, and something that speaks directly to its child readers. Anxious children, kids that feel deeply for animals, and young people who are worried about some big change in their lives (particularly if it’s a move) will all be able to particularly relate to what Goodbye, Koi is telling them: sometimes, you have to give up what’s familiar for a chance to glimpse the sky.

On shelves September 15th

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.

Video: Here’s a treat. Jack Wong himself explains a bit about the book:

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2026, Reviews, Reviews 2026