"I don't especially think you're sick, but you should always go ahead and sleep as late as you want in the morning, since you aren't going to school."

Eefa thinks it over a bit and concludes this is probably not Mikko saying he's going to try making her sleep longer. Probably.

Speaking of school, can she read? They're gonna start working on that.

She cannot read but is actually quite excited to learn! Though at first she's a bit confused about how the letters look different from the ones she's seen on signs and things before.

Can she draw some of the letters she remembers?

Here is a very wobbly W and a very wobbly uppercase A and an N that's backwards.

Those are indeed not Tapap letters! They spirit away the drawing the next time she's not looking and focus on teaching her to read.

She would be a bit unnerved by how they are sneaking it away but she doesn't see doesn't notice them doing it.

Learning to read is actually sort of fun and she's surprisingly good at it.

Great! They have lots of books at lots of reading levels here.

She likes figuring her way through some of the bigger ones even if it's hard. 

She's welcome to do that! They have a normal complement of entertaining children's books for all castes, from "Computers are Yellow!" to "How Trains Go", and also things more likely to be relevant to their usual clientele, like "Divorce Is Messy" and "Shian's New Dads".

Computers are yellow?

Yup. It's a history of the development of computers and the early yellow figures in programming and maintaining them. Greens invented computers, but yellows worked together to make sure they could get jobs in this exciting field, seeing the potential before anyone else.

This book is very confusing considering she doesn't know what a computer is or why being yellow or green would matter.

She has seen train tracks before but is pretty sure that trains don't go anymore. Maybe "Divorce is Messy" will make more sense?

It's nonfiction about a bunch of kids whose parents got divorced acrimoniously and how their living situations got sorted out afterwards and what lessons to take from them. Divorced parents can be very angry at each other and still love their kids more than anything in the world! It's normal to be nervous about stepparents, but they are just regular people who want to be part of your family. If you want to try to avoid getting divorced when you are grown up it helps to marry someone you've known for at least a year, in your own caste, whose parents and grandparents are still married, who doesn't get intoxicated or violent or do crimes or make bad money decisions, but people can try to do everything right and still wind up needing to separate. Having divorced parents is actually really different from having parents who clubbed up to make you and were never intending to be a family with each other besides through you! Family court has a blue judge deciding what home will be best for you; if one of your parents impresses the judge more that doesn't always mean your other parent is a bad person. Vee and triangle divorces are extra complicated!

"Does everyone have parents?" Eefa asks Chioss when she's gotten help with a difficult sentence in this very strange book.

"Every Amentan has parents," says Chioss. "Two biological parents, and maybe some others who help raise them."

So everyone from here has a parent but maybe not people from different places.

"It sounds hard."

"I think having parents is probably easier than being all alone as a kid," Chioss says.

"That doesn't sound right."

"Maybe it's only like that for Amentans."

"How are parents good for Amentans?"

"Amentans start out really helpless and tiny, like the baby sister in the last movie we saw. They can't talk or feed themselves or move around or anything! Their parents help them with everything, and then slowly start helping with less and less while the baby learns to do more. Most people don't feel all done getting help from their parents until they're all grown up."

"What if they don't want help?"

Eefa has seen a baby before and knows they're supposed to turn into people eventually and she can't think of a reason people would lie about that but it still seems really weird.

"Depends how old they are and how quick they are at learning skills, how much help they need even if they don't feel like it and how much space they need to try stuff on their own."