The Other Side of the Lunchroom

What does “fair” mean when the same rule helps one person and hurts another? The Other Side of the Lunchroom helps children ages 7 to 11 see that a decision that looks obvious from where they stand can look very different from someone else’s seat. Mira’s school is voting on a longer lunch, and Mira thinks the answer is easy. Who wouldn’t want ten more minutes? Then she starts listening. Marcus has a forty-five-minute bus ride and would walk home in the dark. Amara is shy and needs lunch to practice talking to people. Kenji has to meet his little sister at the bus stop. Tomas has diabetes and needs time to eat properly. DeShawn gets free lunch and it is his biggest meal of the day. Priya finds the cafeteria so loud that she counts the minutes until it ends. The same ten minutes mean something different to every one of them, and nobody is being selfish. By the end, Mira has not solved the lunch problem, but she has changed how she thinks about it. Instead of asking which side is right, she asks who a rule affects and how. The book closes with Mira’s Insight, a one-sentence takeaway in her own voice, and a Thinking Prompt that invites readers to look at a rule in their own school or home the same way. This is Book 1 of The Other Side, a seven-book series that follows eleven-year-old Mira as she learns to listen, question her assumptions, and discover the stories she could not see at first. Each book stands alone and ends with its own insight and prompt, which makes the series easy to use for read-alouds, morning meetings, and classroom discussions about perspective, fairness, and empathy. The story runs 24 pages with five full-page illustrations. The Other Side was written by Ellie Kim, a high school senior who built the series from the lessons she teaches in her library debate program for younger students, and illustrated by Cara Ko, a high school senior studying visual art. Read more