Project Mulberry

Overview

Linda Sue Park's novel follows Julia Song, a Korean American fourth grader, as she and her classmate Patrick take on a silkworm-raising project for their school's after-school club. What begins as a straightforward assignment in patience and observation becomes something larger: a study of how the two children see each other, and how they come to see themselves differently by the project's end.

Julia initially resists working with Patrick, and their early exchanges carry the friction of assumptions neither of them has examined closely. As the silkworms progress through their life cycle, the narrative uses that slow, visible transformation as a quiet counterpoint to the less visible changes taking place between the two kids.

Interspersed between chapters are brief conversational asides between Park and Julia herself, in which the two discuss choices being made about the story as it's being written. This structural device pulls back the curtain on authorship and invites young readers to think about how a story's shape and its meaning are built together, rather than simply narrating events from a distance.

A Story About Stories

Part of what makes the book distinctive is its willingness to let a young narrator push back on her own author. Julia isn't a passive vessel for a lesson; she questions plot developments, objects to characterization, and negotiates with Park over how her own story should unfold. That friction models something rarely handed to elementary-age readers directly: the idea that a story about identity and prejudice is itself a construction, shaped by choices an author makes about whose perspective to center and how much discomfort to allow onto the page.

The silkworm project functions as a structural spine for the book's real subject, which is the gradual, unglamorous work of revising a first impression. Park doesn't resolve Julia and Patrick's friendship through a single dramatic event; it accumulates through shared chores, small admissions, and the kind of patience the insects themselves require. The book sits within a body of Park's work that returns often to Korean and Korean American experience, and it's frequently read alongside her other middle-grade fiction as an entry point for classroom discussions of heritage, bias, and belonging pitched at a younger age than much of the genre attempts.

Why Project Mulberry Has Been Challenged

A parent complaint that came before a school board focused on the frankness with which the book allows its child characters to voice biased assumptions about one another before those assumptions are corrected, arguing that the material was too advanced for the age group assigned to read it and that the classroom discussion it would provoke was better suited to older students. The concern centered less on any single scene than on the broader question of whether elementary readers should encounter racial prejudice articulated in a peer's own voice, even within a story ultimately oriented toward empathy and correction. The book is recorded in this catalog as having been challenged in 1 state and 1 district, a narrower footprint than many frequently challenged titles, but the objection reflects a recurring pattern in reviews of Park's work: discomfort with putting language of bias directly into the mouths of children, rather than filtering it through adult narration or hindsight.