Results tagged “Book Reviews” from Shen's Blog

Before I read Shining Star: The Anna May Wong Story, by Paula Yoo and illustrated by Lin Wang, I had never even heard of actress Anna May Wong. I've never been much of a movie buff, if that's any excuse. So I opened this wide picture book with no preconceived ideas of what to expect and was pleasantly surprised. Without fanfare or didacticism, Shining Star goes way beyond the confines of a mere biography of a movie star and addresses a whole world of issues related to Chinese-American history and racism in the early 20th century.

Beginning with a nine-year-old Anna May daydreaming in her family's laundry in Los Angeles, the story brings us quickly to understand the financial hardship of the Wong family, as well as Anna May's longing to escape from her own drab life into the exciting world of movies. Despite the usual obstacles of her parents' disapproval and her Chinese ethnicity, she persevered at her dream to become a famous actress. The reality was, she found out, that she was always cast as negatively drawn, stereotypical characters and often was not given a role at all because of her race.

Author Paula Yoo deals with this reality admirably by telling Anna May's story in a clear, straightforward, non-sensationalist manner. When Anna May Wong finally won her first big role in Bits of Life in 1921, Yoo writes that Anna May was shocked to find out that movie studios at the time forbade actors and actresses of color to kiss their white costars. She then watched costar Lon Chaney covered in "yellowface" makeup, a gross distortion of Asian features involving yellow face powder and taped-up squinty eyes. Anna May "wondered if movie viewers would assume all Chinese people looked that horrible." But the money she was earning was badly needed by her family, and she set her concerns aside.

Yoo describes Anna May Wong's relationship with Hollywood in a way that does not demonize the system or the people involved in moviemaking that the time. However, readers still feel Anna May's disappointment and frustration, and are able to understand the unfairness of such a system from her point of view.

The turning point in Anna May's life occurs during her first trip to China. Yoo writes, "Anna May decided that she would honor her father and her Chinese heritage by fighting for more authentic images of Asians on-screen." And she did, returning to Hollywood and only accepting positive portrayals of Asian characters for the rest of her career.

Without saying so overtly, Yoo has told a story of a pioneer in racial equality who confronts the reality of racism and battles the system from the inside. It's wonderful to learn about strong minority women who have paved the way for greater understanding and equality for all of us in every field, including the happily-ever-after world of the movies.

Shining Star: The Anna May Wong Story by Paula Yoo, illustrated by Lin Wang

I approached Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything In It by Sundee T. Frazier with some trepidation, as I'm not a big fan of books where the main character's race is the central issue. Normally, I would rather see a more nuanced approach to the subject of race, where a character's appearance or cultural difference affects multiple facets of the story without being the story itself (like in real life). However, I was pleasantly surprised at Sundee Frazier's refreshing ability to approach Brendan Buckley's biracial background directly, while still weaving a fun story with great characters that charmed and touched me emotionally.

Brendan Buckley is your average ten-year-old kid who fancies himself a scientist, and looks forward to a summer full of bicycle riding, Tae Kwan Do, and figuring out the answers to his Big Questions. He is also half black and half white, and while he has always been close with his black grandparents, he has never even met his white grandparents. Until one day, when he discovers that his Grandpa Ed lives nearby and begins to visit him secretly.

It is around the same time that Brendan also encounters some bullies who seem to find his dark skin reason enough to pick on him. Which leads him to some of his biggest questions ever. My favorite scenes in the book are those in which Brendan and his parents work through these questions, and how each of Brendan's parents interpret racism in a way that is both truthful yet gentle. Their love for each other and for Brendan is clear, and each tries to explain hatred in others without resorting to hatred of their own.

As it turns out, Grandpa Ed has his own issues with race. But Frazier works with Ed's prejudices beautifully, without making him out to be a bad guy or a good guy, but genuinely conflicted over his own beliefs and the consequences of them. And there is something so refreshing about Brendan's straightforward, scientific nature that allows him to, after gathering up his courage, ask his grandfather right out, "You mean you didn't want my mom to marry my dad because he's black." Ed doesn't have a pat answer, and it's clear he doesn't understand it himself, nor are there any easy answers when it comes to prejudice.

Frazier has wonderfully woven a summer full of fun, adventure, learning, and triumphs with a refreshing and sensitive look at racism and multiracial families. I would highly recommend Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything In It for all readers for a nuanced and deeper understanding of these issues.

Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything In It by Sundee T. Frazier

Adoption books are hard to get right. That's what I think. Too many are overly sentimental, trying too hard to tread the thin line between expressing the adoptive parents' love and explaining the whats and whys of adoption. But in Ten Days and Nine Nights, Yumi Heo gets it right. By keeping the text ultra-simple, by showing how small acts have big meanings, and by allowing the illustrations to tell much of the story, Heo conveys how every member of the family is looking forward to welcoming a new baby, and how joyous the occasion is.

The premise of the story is brilliant: a little girl counts down the days from when her mother departs on an airplane to when she comes back home with a new member of the family from Korea. Each page is has only one sentence, depicting a single act of preparing for the baby's arrival, and a calendar with X's marking the days. "I have ten days and nine nights," it begins, and counts down from there. The little girl does things to prepare like washing her old teddy bear and making a drawing of her kitty, that then goes up on the nursery wall. One page reads, "I practice," as she holds a doll in her arms. Another reads, "I tell Molly," and she and her friend stand by the crib. Without any words, you know what the girls are talking about and thinking.

Interspersed throughout the countdown are wordless spreads showing her mother's journey: on the airplane, signing papers at the adoption agency, meeting the new baby at the orphanage. The pacing is surprisingly cinematic and full of momentum. As the number of days decreases, we feel an excitement. Finally, "Daddy puts the CLOSED sign on his dry cleaning store. I have only one day!" And the whole family greets Mother and new baby at the airport.

Yumi Heo has always been so good at conveying a child's view of the world through simple text and wonderfully emotive illustrations. In Ten Days and Nine Nights, she successfully depicts an overseas adoption with just the right combination of information and joy.

Ten Days and Nine Nights
by Yumi Heo

This book has everything!  Beautiful text, timed just right to be simultaneously horrifying and heartwarming, suspense, excitement, a wise man's puzzling act. A colorful celebration followed by raging fires and massive destruction, a hero, then a happy ending. Oh, and of course, amazing artwork.

Tsunami is a tale told in the folk tradition of a Japanese village by the sea. Ojisan, a rich but wise old rice farmer, lived on the mountain high above the village and the sea. One day, as the village was celebrating the rice harvest, Ojisan had a strange feeling, and decided not to go. "Something does not feel right," he told his grandson. Sure enough, they felt a mild earthquake rumble under their feet, but then it was gone. Ojisan still did not feel right. Then he noticed that "THE SEA WAS RUNNING AWAY FROM THE LAND!" Because the celebrating villagers did not understand the danger, they chased the sea away as it exposed smooth sand. But Ojisan understood, and came up with a plan to save the four hundred villagers who were too far away to hear his shouts.

It goes without saying the any book illustrated by Ed Young will be wonderful to look at, but Tsunami is superlative even among his books. The illustrations are composed of cut-paper collage, but the details are exceptionally stunning-- from the village celebration of parading men and kimono-ed women, to the breathtaking spread of the great wall of water headed for the seaside village. The fibers of the paper create the churning whitewater breaking over a sea of blackness, engulfing the shore. Exquisite.

The text, however, is even better than the illustrations. Kimiko Kajikawa adapted this story from a short story published in 1897, and has done so perfectly. The language and pacing is so perfect that I wanted to savor every sentence. Ojisan's quiet wisdom was so clear on every page, and his kindness and horror were equally clear, in the all-caps sentences: THE SEA WAS RUNNING AWAY FROM THE LAND! On the double-page spread following the wall of water, Young depicts a churning flow of water and village architecture. Kajikawa writes, "Then the sea drew back, roaring, tearing out the land as it went. Twice, thrice, four times, the furious sea devoured the village."

Every page of Tsunami filled me with different emotions, from peace to horror, to cheering, to despair. Until the ending, after Ojisan has saved the villagers, though not the village, his generosity and kindness overwhelmed me. I closed the book, smiling and swallowing hard.

Tsunami by Kimiko Kajikawa, illustrated by Ed Young

Erika is an American girl who finds herself irresistibly drawn to a print of a Japanese house in at her Grandmother's when she is little. This print sparks her lifelong love of Japan and her dream of one day living in a house just like the one in the picture. When she finally reaches Japan after graduating from college, she struggles with the discrepancy between the reality of Tokyo and other cities and the idyllic picture of old Japan she carries in her mind. However, after a few tries, she does indeed find what she is looking for.

Allen Say's quiet storytelling is simple and understated, but it beautifully conveys the longing in Erika's journey, her disappointment in the first few days, and her joy in finding the right place for herself. His illustrations, though, are what make this book an incredible journey for the reader. The crowded train platform in Tokyo, the festival in the traditional town, the group of little children all amazed to see a foreigner in their schoolyard-- Say captures these snapshots of Japanese life and culture so vividly that you hardly need read the text at all.

In the end, Erika-San is an immigrant story, which is a nice change from the usual coming-to-America immigrant story. And it is a love story between Erika and another teacher named Akira. It is also interesting how Akira worries that Erika may not like him because he is not Japanese enough-- he prefers coffee to tea and does not know anything about the Japanese tea ceremony. These details are wonderful and thoughtful, and like everything else in the book, subtle.

I'm not sure if this book will hold the attention of young readers. They may be interested in the journey and in the pictures, but the romance and the quiet longing may be lost on them. However, it is a finely told stories with even finer illustrations, so Erika-San is sure to resonate with many.

Erika-San
by Allen Say

Oh Demi, how much do I love you? Let me count the ways:

• Your simple yet informative writing teaches readers about the most amazing things. Your biographies especially introduce great figures in a way that everyone can understand and appreciate, in language that is always fitting for the subject.
• Your illustrations, also so simple yet filled with depth, create harmony with the text, with the book design, and with the reader. Your colors are so brilliant, their range from translucent to golden, shimmer with life.
• Your biography subjects are the most interesting figures in history, yet relatively unknown in the west. You make them accessible to all of us who have hearts and minds open to learn.
• You are not afraid to tackle the big ideas, despite writing for children.

The Legend of Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching is just one more incredible book to add to Demi's portfolio. I was skeptical at first, thinking that Lao Tzu was perhaps a subject too difficult for kids. However, I was captivated by every page of the book, and I'm sure kids who like to be challenged will be too.

Though the story of Lao Tzu's life is told as a legend ("...Lao Tzu,who may or may not have been born; who may or may not have founded Taoism... and who may or may not have written one of the greatest books of wisdom in the world"), Demi includes twenty verses of the Tao Te Ching, which is a very real book. I thought the Tao Te Ching would be too deep, or boring, but it was not! In fact, readers could spend hours pondering these verses alone, and find something interested every time. This is the power and beauty of the Tao Te Ching, and Demi's version succeeded in capturing my interest fully.

It also needs not be mentioned that the illustrations that accompany this books are breathtakingly beautiful. It never fails to astonish me how Demi creates the illusion of translucence on opaque paper. And I especially love her tiny figures that you must get up close to, in order to truly appreciate their detail and charm.

While The Legend of Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching won't do too well as a group read-aloud, it will captivate and intrigue those who take the time and pore over its many delights.

The Legend of Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching by Demi

Tap Dancing on the Roof is a collection of fun poems by Linda Sue Park and illustrated by Istvan Banyai. And while the topics of the poems themselves are not related to Korean culture, the form of the poems are. They are sijo, a type of Korean poem that has a fixed number of stressed syllables, usually divided into three or six lines. Yes, it's sort of like haiku, with two major differences: the syllable count is fourteen-sixteen per line (in English), and the third line must contain a some kind of twist-- either humorous or ironic.

First off, the poems are charming, and the twist at the end of each one makes them great fun to read. Of course, Istvan Banyai's illustrations are always wonderful in that quirky way, and their simplicity fits the style of the poems perfectly. Here's one of my favorites:

Pockets

What's in your pockets right now? I hope they're not empty:
Empty pockets, unread books, lunches left on the bus-- all a waste.
In mine: One horse chestnut. One gum wrapper. One dime. One hamster.

This is a great little volume introducing another type of poem that is fun for kids to read and try to write themselves. I'm glad there is an alternative to the haiku, especially one that is a traditional form from another Asian culture. There is a helpful author's note at the back of the book giving some more details about the syllabic count and stresses, historical background, and further reading.

Tap Dancing on the Roof
sijo by Linda Sue Park
illustrated by Istvan Banyai

My favorite part of traveling to new places is the food. I love finding out what the locals traditionally eat, and am always looking for unique foods that can only be found in that area. I am also inordinately fascinated by what and how people of different cultures eat. So it should be no surprise that I found What the World Eats by photographer Peter Menzel and author Faith D'Aluisio the most fascinating book I've seen in a long time.

Menzel and D'Aluisio profile the meals and eating habits of twenty-five families around the world. Each family is photographed in their home with all the food that they eat in one week, which is then painstakingly listed in detail by category. Also included is a written profile of the family, their daily routines, their thoughts about food, and their cooking. More photographs illuminating specialized farming or cooking for the area are included, as are boxes containing additional information about the countires. After every few families are a few pages that aggregate ancillary information into charts and graphs, like the number of McDonald's restaurants each country has, or the percentage of obese people in each country. This is a book simply packed to bursting with fascinating information.

Naturally, my favorite part is looking at the pictures of a week's worth of food. You can learn so much about a culture just by looking at what people eat. For example, the American families' pictures contain more food than people, while the family in Bhutan depicts $5.03 worth of food and thirteen people. The family from Australia eats a lot of meat, but the Guatemalan family is pictured with a table full of vegetables. The Japanese family has more fish in their picture than any other family, and look at all those bananas the family from Ecuador eats!

I could spend hours poring over these pictures of people and their food, and I could go on endlessly about the details you find when you take the time to look (the family from Turkey eats 32 loaves of bread a week, but there are only 30 in the picture because they ate two loaves while waiting for the photograph to be taken). But the text that accompanies each family's picture is equally, if not more, interesting. And who doesn't love charts and graphs?

Children of all ages will find something to interest them in this book. Older readers will be able to take this information and generate some interesting questions about wealth, health, and political-social implications of food availability. Younger children will love looking at the pictures and learning about how children in other countries eat. What the World Eats is a must-have.

What the World Eats
Photographs by Peter Menzel, Written by Faith D'Aluisio

Afghan Dreams: Young Voices of Afghanistan by Tony O'Brien and Mike Sullivan is a gorgeous book. O'Brien's photographs of children from Kabul and the countryside of Afghanistan are breathtaking, while the text, in those children's own words, is heartbreaking.

Flip through the book and you see the many faces of eight- to sixteen-year olds of Afghanistan. They are strong, they are radiant, they are full of pain, they are full of hope. Most of the children photographed look older than their years, and all of them have sorrow in their pasts. These kids have had terrible, hard lives, and you can see it in their eyes. They images are beautiful and haunting.

The texts are passages written in the children's own words. They describe their lives and their hopes for the future. I have mixed feelings about the text. Although I don't believe that information about the conditions in Afghanistan should be sugarcoated, I felt like the unceasing descriptions of misery and suffering painted a somewhat hopeless picture--one that I'm not sure the authors intended. More than half of the profiles are truly heartbreaking; we know that given the children's circumstances, they probably will never have a chance to realize their hopes and dreams.

But that's me. What will young readers take away from this book? Perhaps they simply need to see that there are strong, young people in war-torn areas that have the most abject conditions behind them, yet still dare to hope. Perhaps they will form their own conclusions about the heartlessness of war and its collateral damage. Though I wouldn't exactly call this book inspiring (there is not enough of a cohesive message to truly inspire any particular thoughts or actions), it is certainly incredibly thought-provoking, one way or another.

Afghan Dreams is not a book for younger children. I would only recommend it for middle school and up, and it would probably be best if the reader already had at least a basic understanding of the history and/or current events in Afghanistan.

Afghan Dreams: Young Voices of Afghanistan
by Tony O'Brien and Mike Sullivan

Silent Music by James Rumford is an incredible, beautiful, inspiring picture book that pays homage to art, to language, and to Middle Eastern culture, while also giving a nod to the current war in Iraq and the hope for peace in the future. Run out and buy this book for your home or school library. It is amazing.

Ali is a boy who lives in Baghdad. While he loves playing soccer and listening to music and dancing, what he loves most is practicing Arabic calligraphy. Rumford's illustration in mixed media and collage in golden tones shows snippets of calligraphy and large Arabic words dancing across the pages, and when Ali describes his pen "stopping and starting, gliding and sweeping, leaping, dancing to the silent music in my head," we can really see the joy in the sweeps of the pen on every page.

Ali's secret hero is Yakut, a calligrapher from the thirteenth century. He tells a story of when the Mongols attacked Baghdad in 1258, and Yakut hid in a high tower where he shut out the war by writing "glistening letters of rhythm and grace." When the bombs fall on Baghdad in 2003, Ali does the same.To Ali, writing calligraphy is an escape, a peace within himself.

Two pages then show the Arabic words for "war" and "peace." The word peace, or salam, is harder to write than harb, or war. "..It resists me when I make the difficult waves and the slanted staff," he says. But it is salam that Ali chooses to practice, "until this word flows freely from my pen."

Rumford brings so much to so few words and his gorgeous illustrations.The text is so simple, but it gives rise to so many ideas and feelings about art, music, dancing, hard work, history, tradition, culture, war, peace, family, and beauty. It was a joy to read.

Silent Music by James Rumford

Come and Play is a compilation of photographs of children at play from around the world. Each photograph is accompanied by a poem collaboratively written by children in editor Ayana Lowe's cultural art classes in New York City. The photographs are taken from the archives of Magnum Photos, a photo collective of great renown. On a first read, I thought the book charming and fun, but flipping through the large pages, I find myself appreciating each spread anew as I encounter it again. The more I look, the more fascinated I am at how the book conveys its message on so many levels.

One of the first things I noticed about the photographs in this book was that they span a great many years. Some photographs were taken fifty years ago, while some were taken in the past few years. They also span a variety of types of play, from the most familiar (kids dangling from a fence or at the beach), to familiar activities in unfamiliar settings, to portrayals of cultures very different from ours.

Photo compilations like this always have the same fundamental message of unity--that no matter where children live, they laugh and play just like you. Come and Play stands out because it portrays children in wide-ranging types of play, points in time, as well as places around the world. Consciously or not, readers are identifying with these pictures on many levels.

The accompanying poems also work on more than one level. Though they are written by children they still capture so well the spirit of each image. (My favorite is a picture of two boys in Thailand sitting in a boat. One of the boys is reaching to grab the other's straw hat. The accompanying poem reads, "My hat!/No! It's my hat./No! My hat./Don't take my hat./No! No! No!") In some cases, they draw the reader's attention to certain parts of the photograph, or certain emotions, that surprising and unique. That the poems were written by children makes them both more endearing to adult readers and inspiring to young readers.

Come and Play is definitely a good addition to this genre of photo-compilations. There is a lot for both adults and children to appreciate, and it would even benefit from a shared reading, since adults can explain a picture's background information. For example, one beautiful photograph portrays Pablo Picasso with his son. In another, a group of Chinese children are gathered around a makeshift ping pong table in Shanghai in 1980, before the economic boom. I doubt you would find a scene like this in Shanghai now. These pictures are certainly interesting on their own, but with more background information, they become a fascinating starting point for discussion.

Come and Play: Children of Our World Having Fun with poems by children, edited by Ayana Lowe

Every once in while, I find myself reading a book completely cold--going only on the basis of a recommendation, having not read any reviews or even the jacket flap of the book. So I was deep into Trouble by Gary Schmidt before I realized, holy cow! This is a multicultural book! How did I not know that before? This discovery only added to my enjoyment of the book and, if I may say so myself, Schmidt brilliantly addresses a breadth of issues related to immigration and American values.

Trouble is about fourteen-year old Henry Smith, whose family has been a pillar of their small New England town for generations. But even the venerable Smiths, who have built their solid home as far away from trouble as possible, are vulnerable to tragedy. When Henry's older brother gets hit by a Cambodian immigrant's car, the racially homogenous town reacts violently to both Chay, the teen in the car, and the entire neighboring community of immigrants.

Schmidt masterfully builds the reader's awareness of the tensions between the staid New England community and its neighboring town of immigrants. This gradual understanding was particularly compelling for me, having no prior knowledge of the premise. Equally compelling are the snippets, basically, of poetic text from Chay's point of view that reveal so much about Chay: his story, his dreams, and his character. Set amidst a first-person narrative from Henry's point of view, we can feel the heart wrenching grief of Henry's family tragedy, but at the same time begin to understand that others may be experiencing their own type of grief simultaneously.

Trouble is a worthy read because it treats the issue of immigration and racism as a complex one. Neither group is portrayed as the Good Guys or the Bad Guys. Each has its own set of prejudices, and each has its own history and culture to draw upon and defend. Yet, even as we readers try to come to decisions of our own, we are constantly being provided with new information that changes our beliefs subtly with each new twist. We desperately want Henry (and Chay as well) to be a good person and do the right thing, but even we are not sure what that means in the end. What does it mean to be American? What are "American Values" and are they different from other cultures' values? Should immigrants be assimilated into existing societies, or should they stay separate? Does being a native of a land come with a set of different rights? Schmidt does a wonderful job of letting us think things over on our own without ever telling us what to think.

Trouble by Gary Schmidt

In Cynthia Kadohata's newest book, Outside Beauty, 13-year-old Shelby and her three sisters struggle with some pretty big concepts of family, beauty, and strength of character. The four sisters each have a different father, but are kept together as a loving family by their strong-willed mother Helen, whose philosophy in life is to use her beauty to gain any advantage possible. The girls quickly learn to deal with their mother's many suitors, constant moving to avoid one or another of them, and their estranged relationships with their own fathers. What makes the book particularly intriguing to me is that Helen is Japanese-American, while each of the girls' fathers is of a different race.

The fathers in Outside Beauty are Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Anglo-Saxon. And while the narrator Shelby makes it a point to introduce her sisters along with their racial backgrounds, these differences are completely ignored by the girls themselves. This is, in the end, not a book about a dysfunctional multiracial family--it is a book about a dysfunctional family, period.

The genius of Kadohata's subtle treatment of race is reflected in the main theme of what physical features and "outside beauty" mean to different people and how it defines us. Though Helen has taught the girls to prize their physical attributes above all else, Shelby realizes that she wants other things to be important too. She discovers that she lives in a "parallel universe" from her mother's, one where beauty doesn't matter. What is lovely about Kadohata's parallel universes is that while it is a revelation for the girls to find one where beauty doesn't matter, they already unknowingly reside in one where race doesn't matter. Their race isn't absent, it just doesn't matter.

There are few moments where race is even mentioned. During one tense moment when the four girls check into a motel late at night, unchaperoned, the manager says, "We don't get many young ladies here. Not many Orientals either." Another is when the well-meaning but somewhat tactless Italian father says to Shelby's Japanese father at one point, apropos of nothing, "I admire the Japanese." These moments come and go so quickly that they make us aware that others are aware of race, but in this universe, it matters even less than beauty does.

Outside Beauty by Cynthia Kadohata
Middle Grade Fiction