[Y] The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin

The “Year of” books always seem to be Chinese-related, even though the same zodiac system is used throughout East Asia at least. I remember last year for A to Z, I wanted to do what I thought was “The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson” for “Y,” but then when I was looking it up, I realized that the title was actually In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. This year, I bought a bunch of books by Grace Lin, and luckily, two of them actually did start with “(The) Year of.”

The Year of the Dog is the book I wished I had when I was growing up. It is just an ordinary book about a Taiwanese American girl growing up in a community with very few Asians. While I grew up in a pretty diverse community, a lot of the things Pacy (Grace) experiences are close to my heart, especially her confusion about the difference between Taiwan and China. I remember not knowing the difference until 3rd grade, when I did a report on China because I thought we were Chinese.

“But I’m not really Chinese either. It’s kind of confusing. My parents came from Taiwan. Some people thought Taiwan was part of China. So then calling me Chinese was kind of correct. Other people thought Taiwan was a country all by itself, so then I should be called Taiwanese. It didn’t help that my parents spoke both Chinese and Taiwanese.” (p. 18 of the paperback version)

My parents are staunchly on the Taiwan as a country side, so they were upset when I identified as Chinese at school, but I thought Lin’s explanation of the dilemma is pretty straightforward and apolitical, like her mother’s answer to her question about what to say when people ask her what she is: “‘You tell them that you’re American,’ Mom told me firmly.” (p. 19)

I also related to her experiences around other Taiwanese American kids, because although I speak Taiwanese and Mandarin, I was a Twinkie wannabe because the other option would’ve been a FOB, and I was born in America so being a Twinkie seemed like the cooler thing to be.

There were also things that I learned about Taiwanese culture that I didn’t know because what gets passed down to the second generation is usually a little spotty, so everyone ends up learning different things. In light of my last A to Z post on xxxHolic, it was interesting how almost everything in this book was translated into an English equivalent because this book is completely geared toward the general American audience, while xxxHolic is obviously for people with some knowledge of Japanese culture (although it can be enjoyed by people who do not). Although, just like in my family, Lin uses a mixture of Chinese and Taiwanese at home, so she uses both for the few words she romanizes and defines in context. My favorite of her translations is “flaky dried pork” for “rousong” or “pork floss” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rousong), which is always something I have a hard time describing to people who have never had it (although we usually eat the fish version at home).

A must-read for all Taiwanese American kids, but it is also a great entryway into learning about Taiwanese culture for kids of other backgrounds. I haven’t read Lin’s other books yet, but they’re waiting for me on my shelf!

This post is my Blogging from A to Z entry for the letter Y.

[W] Wonder by R. J. Palacio

(#65 on School Library Journal‘s Top 100 Chapter Book Poll Results from 2012. Part of this was originally written for my History of Youth Literature class.)

“The universe takes care of all its birds.”

Wonder by R. J. Palacio is about Auggie, a boy with a facial deformity who is about to start going to school with other kids. The book follows him and his friends, family, and classmates as they struggle with how to incorporate him into their lives. Palacio tells the stories in parts, shifting the point of view from one character to another so that we can see how each character reacts to Auggie. For the most part, it’s pretty effective (although I had a little trouble when one of the teens decides to write with bad grammar after the younger characters are portrayed so eloquently. It seemed like Palacio was taking kind of the easy way out with that character’s voice).

It is an inspiring story about overcoming differences and being kind to each other. I don’t know anyone who read this book who didn’t love it.* It was one of those books that I had checked out because it was on the Top 100 and I hadn’t read it before, but I had actually planned to do Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin for my “W” book instead. (I had to keep myself from reading it so I could do “W” on this book because I have different book by Grace Lin coming up!)

I loved this book so much that I’m reading it in my 6th grade book club class now. This is probably the first book I’ve chosen that I didn’t choose just because it was a good story at a good reading level. It’s both of those things, but I also chose it because I think there are a lot of themes about bullying and friendship and just being kind in this book that are important for middle schoolers to learn.

*Apparently a lot of other people in L.A. want to read this book, too, because it was the only book of the six Top 100 I’d checked out that couldn’t be renewed, which was why I was “forced” to read it before the others… Our library system needs to get more copies of this book!

This post is my Blogging from A to Z entry for the letter W.

[V] The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket

I’ve read a few books in The Series of Unfortunate Events, and while I don’t dislike them, I’m not a huge fan of them. This particular book I actually checked out once to read for last year’s challenge, but I ended up using The View from Saturday instead (RIP E.L. Konigsburg ). I ended up with the ebook this year in a bundle of three Unfortunate Events books because that was the only thing immediately available from the library.

The Vile Village is the seventh book in the series and follows the three Baudelaire orphans to a village full of crows in an attempt to find a place for them to live. The evil Count Olaf is still after them, and they need to save their friends, the two surviving Quagmire triplets.

All of the kids I know who have read this series really enjoy it, and if I had first read these books as a child, I think I would have liked them a lot more. Daniel Handler (the man behind Lemony Snicket) does a good job of introducing hard words and writing about what they mean, teaching vocabulary in context while being entertaining at the same time.

However, for an adult who already knows what the words mean, all the explanations make you feel like you’re reading twice as many words for the same amount of content, and it slows down the pacing of the story. Also, I’ve only read a few of the books, but they all seem to be pretty similar, and because they are “unfortunate events,” they pretty much all have bad endings, which doesn’t make it a very satisfying read (and according to a student who has read all the books, the series itself also has a bad ending).

It’s all right if you like that kind of thing, but I got kind of tired of the “author” telling me to stay as far away from the book as possible every time I picked up one of the books in the series. I can ignore it if the book captivates my attention enough, but in this case, I think I might just listen to him.

Great for kids who like to learn big words, but maybe not for cynical adults like me.

This post is my Blogging from A to Z entry for the letter V.

[P] Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

(I was going to read this book for my pre-1900 book in my History of Youth Literature class, but I decided to read Black Beauty instead because I already knew the basic story of Pinocchio. I went back and read it for my “P” book, though.)

I think pretty much everyone knows the story of Pinocchio–at least the Disney version of it. It was never one of my favorite Disney movies, and after reading the original version (published by Italian author Carlo Collodi in 1883), I can kind of see why. I think the problem with the Disney version was that it stuck too close to the original story, and in the book and in the movie, Pinocchio is an exasperating character.

The purpose of the book is to teach little boys to be good and obey their parents, so naturally, Pinocchio represents all the little boys who act before they think and get into all kinds of scrapes because they go against what their parents tell . Little boys are supposed to read Pinocchio and think, “Oh, what a nice life he would have had if he had only listened to (his parents/the fairy/the cricket)!”

The main difference between the book and the movie is probably the Blue Fairy, who in the book starts as a little girl with blue hair and acts as his little sister, and later turns into a woman who acts more like a mother to him. But the role she serves is pretty much the same. She save him, chastises him, warns him not to do it again, and then sends him off on his way (so he can do something else equally or more foolish).

Also, from what I remember of the movie, Pinocchio’s most memorable feature is his nose that grows when he lies. This is not nearly as important in the book, and it even gets broken off so that it gets closer to a normal length, which is something that I don’t remember in the movie.

My memory of the movie is pretty hazy, though, since I’ve probably only watched the whole thing through once or twice a long time ago… I recently watched a Japanese stage adaptation that seemed to stick closer to the book than the movie (I remember being surprised when Pinocchio’s nose got kicked off by Geppetto’s cat, thinking it was a device they used so the actor playing Pinocchio wouldn’t have to go through the whole play with an extension on his nose, but it turns out it was actually something from the book.) I enjoyed this adaptation more than the Disney version, but probably because they deviated more from the original story. Pinocchio was put in the frame of a modern school setting, and going through the adventures of Pinocchio made the main character into a stronger person who eventually made friends with the kids who were bullying him at the beginning.

In a way, I think placing it in a modern setting gives it the context needed to see how the story can apply to real life without forcing the lesson onto students. I’ve been thinking a lot about pairing classics with modern stories and nonfiction lately because of my Youth Literature class, and this story within a story frame version of Pinocchio reminds me of what we’ve been talking about.

This post is my Blogging from A to Z entry for the letter P.

[L] Leonardo da Vinci by Kathleen Krull

(This was first written for my History of Youth Literature class.)

Leonardo da Vinci was written by Kathleen Krull, the 2011 Children’s Book Guild of Washington, D.C. Nonfiction Award Winner for Body of Work. The book itself was named CBC/NSTA Outstanding Science Book of the Year, included on other notable lists, and received rave reviews.

When I first downloaded the eBook, I was expecting something more like the biographies of presidents that my students had to read last month for nonfiction month in the AR-based reading program at their school. The book I saw had a lot of pictures, but it read more like an encyclopedia or textbook than a story. It also had long, convoluted sentences with bigger words than necessary that made it hard for my students to understand.

On the other hand, Krull uses simple prose that reads like a novel, and the book itself feels much less like a typical (in my mind) nonfiction book and more like a book that I would normally read. I had to return some books anyway, so I ended up going to the library and checking out the physical book before I even had a chance to start reading the eBook. The only thing about the book that made me feel like it was a nonfiction book instead of a novel (other than the title) was the “Giants of Science” series name written across the bottom of the volume. Otherwise, the design of the book itself seemed very much like that of a middle grade historical fiction novel.

Although I don’t generally think of myself as a nonfiction fan, I can see myself reading a lot more of these narrative biographies after reading this book. It’s been a long time since I read a nonfiction book I couldn’t put down, but I had a hard time leaving for work today because I didn’t want to stop reading. I loved being able to read about what da Vinci was like as a person, and all the talk of his inventions reminded me of my visit to the da Vinci exhibition when it was in L.A. a few years ago. There was even a shoutout to my favorite of his inventions, a portable bridge made of sticks that could be fitted together when the army got to a river and then taken apart again afterwards. (As part of the exhibition, we got to try to put the bridge together ourselves and even walk over it once we were done.)

I do worry about the false impressions of people’s lives that narrative versions can give, though, even after reading this well-researched, well-written book. I think Krull did a great job of writing about the bad parts of da Vinci along with the good, but because of the lighthearted-tone of the book as a whole, I felt like it was playing down the bad and emphasizing the good. The overall effect made da Vinci and his life seem better than they really were.

Even so, I would definitely recommend this to all kids, even those who don’t usually like nonfiction (or maybe especially to them). I was only a few chapters into the book when I started planning ways to use these types of books in my lessons. I might not use this one in particular, but Kathleen Krull has written a lot of books (and from some of the other reviews in class, she’s not the only one who has written engaging nonfiction for kids).

I also loved the illustration on the cover by Boris Kulikov with da Vinci as an old man trying to fly with wings made of pages from his notebooks. The expression on his face is hilarious to me for some reason. (There was one illustration that caused a little bit of a disconnect to me with da Vinci writing “Notebook” backwards in English even though he was supposed to only know Italian and eventually Latin, but I understand how the illustration is trying to give students an idea of what da Vinci was doing using what they are familiar with.)

This post is my Blogging from A to Z entry for the letter L.

[K] Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata

(This was first written for my History of Youth Literature class, but I posted them at almost the same time. ^^;)

Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata (2004) is a book that first caught my eye because of the Japanese in the title. It’s an onomatopoetic word that means glittering, or sparkling, and can be used to refer to all sorts of different things (stars, eyes, a clean kitchen counter…). In the book, it’s how the narrator’s older sister, Lynn, sees the world. Katie, the main character and narrator, worships her sister and her ability to transform ordinary objects into kira-kira­ by the way she thinks about them.

The book is about how the main character and her family deals with her sister’s lymphoma and subsequent death. It goes through Katie’s feelings of denial, helplessness, despair, anger, and guilt, but most of all, it shows the love she felt for her sister and her family. It is definitely not the kind of book I would pick up on my own, and probably not one I would read again, but it was a good story that packed an emotional punch at the end.

I put off reading this book for a long time because I had heard how sad it was (they were right). I probably would not have even read the book if I hadn’t been looking for a “K” book for my blog, and the book happened to be available at my local library. I knew that it was a Newbery winner (that was where it caught my eye in the first place), and it also won that APALA Youth Literature Award for 2005-2006.

Aside from being a powerful story, the book also deals with racism in the Deep South in the 1950s. In the book, when Katie and her family move to Georgia, there are only 31 other Japanese people in their town. People are not really sure how to treat them, and white people lump them with the “colored” people. Kids at school don’t hang out with them because they’re Japanese, and their uncle can’t become a land surveyor because of his race.

Growing up in L.A., I never really felt like I was different because of my race, but while I was in college, I actually visited Georgia on tour with our school gospel choir (I was one of 3 Asians, and there were maybe 5 or 6 non-blacks total in the choir…), and it was the first time in my life that I felt really different. I loved being in gospel choir and had a great time, but it was also very strange. Thinking back on that experience now, it makes me think that Georgia, and maybe even the U.S. is not so different now from what it was 50 or so years before.

But, as Codell (2009) writes, “the world has changed, however slowly and incompletely” (para. 4). The fact that there are books like Kira-Kira now is evidence of this. This book is great for anyone who wants to know more about the Asian American experience during a time in the U.S. when overt discrimination and racism were still part of the norm. But more than that, this is a touching story about a family dealing with a terminal illness and all the emotions and issues that go along with it.

This post is my Blogging from A to Z entry for the letter K.

[J] Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson

(#93 on School Library Journal‘s Top 100 Chapter Book Poll Results from 2012.)

Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson is set in 1910 and is about an orphaned English girl named Maia who gets sent off to live in the Amazon with her relatives and has lots of adventures. There’s even a small love triangle with a stage actor she meets on the boat over and a mysterious Indian boy she meets in the jungle. It’s a satisfying read that goes on longer than expected (in a good way) and ties up all the loose ends by the last page.

I loved this book. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading it (all I knew was that it started with the letter “J” and that it was by a popular author I hadn’t really read much of before). It was written more recently than I expected, too, in 2001. I first heard of Ibbotson when I read The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall, but after reading this book, the omnibus of three of her books just jumped to the top of my “to read” pile (right after all the books I need to read for this challenge, and the others I need to read for class…)

Even though I read tons of orphan books growing up and usually prefer to have loving parents (even if they’re absent) these days, Maia was just the kind of character that I liked to read about. She was smart, brave, resourceful, and just plain fun to read about. She was basically what I had hoped Calpurnia Tate would be, but Callie Vee did not keep my attention the way Maia did.

The natives in this book are seen through the rose-colored glasses of Maia, which seem to be typical for the time period, but since it is actually a contemporary book, their portrayal is probably not as offensive as it could have been. Unrealistic maybe, but not offensive. I also spent way too much time while I was reading the book getting distracted by her name, since Maya is a common Japanese name, but I haven’t really heard of an English girl with that name before. (Apparently she was named after Hermes’s mother in Greek mythology, which is appropriate, since her parents were very well-traveled.)

Anyway, everyone should read this book, but it’s great for girls who like historical fiction or adventure books.

This post is my Blogging from A to Z entry for the letter J.

 

[I] The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

(#39 on School Library Journal‘s Top 100 Chapter Book Poll Results from 2012.)

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick is about a boy named Hugo who is trying to fix a mechanical automaton that he believes will write him a message from his father. It’s written and illustrated by Brian Selznick, who is known for drawing the covers of books like Frindle by Andrew Clements, which I wrote about earlier in this year’s A to Z challenge (they’re right next to each other on the list, too!).

I hadn’t heard especially good things either the book or the movie when the movie first came out, so I didn’t really think about reading it, even after seeing one of my students reading it. Flipping through, it just looked like a kind of easy book with a lot of pictures, but when i decided to read it for the Top 100, I saw that it had more depth than I expected from my first impression of it.

I loved the way Selznick used the illustrations as part of the plot, and it totally makes sense for it to be a movie. In fact, right after I read the book, I watched the movie on Amazon Prime because I wanted to see what they did with it. And then, after I watched the movie, I changed my final project to Hugo because I felt like the whole time I was watching the movie, I was already comparing it to the book (I even took notes after the first few things I noticed because it seemed likely that I would want to use it for class even though I had originally signed up for a different book).

I can understand why the people I talked to were less-than-enthusiastic about both the book and the movie, though. Older children or more advanced readers might think that the book is too easy, especially if they are used to skipping pictures when they read. I think it is a great book to explore with students, though, to build critical thinking skills by making them think more deeply about the way the author wrote the book and the effect the combination of illustrations and words in this format has on the reader.

The movie tries to be more of a family movie, but it seems to struggle with balancing artistry with keeping the attention of the kids, and it falls on the artistic side, which is great for adults who watch the movie, but may seem boring to the kids.

(I’ll be doing the book with my students soon and working on this my final project, so there may be a part 2 to this post if I come up with anything good…)

This post is my Blogging from A to Z entry for the letter I.

[G] The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson

(#63 on School Library Journal‘s Top 100 Chapter Book Poll Results from 2012.)

The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson is about a smart, sassy, racist girl named Galadriel (or “Gilly”) who has been causing trouble in the foster care system. I had no idea she was named for the Lord of the Rings character, and I was surprised by how racist she is at the beginning of the book for a main character in a children’s book. But I was impressed by her journey of acceptance for both herself and for those around her, even if she didn’t get quite the happy ending she had hoped for.

I avoided reading this book for a long time, and I’m not really sure why. I think for a while, it was one of those books that I had heard about so much that I thought I’d already read it. Recently, after reading a summary of it, I was able to place it firmly in the “haven’t read” category (or at least the “don’t have any recollection of it at all” category) because I didn’t really feel like reading another rebellious (foster, orphan, adopted, etc.) child books (I’d read plenty growing up). But then, I needed a “G” book off the Top 100 list, so I decided to give it a try. (I also got a copy of The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, which I’ve been meaning to read for forever, but I didn’t really like Coraline all that much, so it made me less enthusiastic about Gaiman’s other “G” book. I’ve checked it out at least twice already, but hopefully I’ll actually get around to reading it this time. I just didn’t get around to it before I had to write this post…)

It was another small ordeal getting a hold of a copy because there were none available through the L.A. (city) public library, so I had to go through the county system. Other than the fact that my county library branch is not quite as close as the city library branch, I also try to avoid the county system because it takes a really long time to get books from different branches, and on top of that, they don’t have email notification when my book arrives. Instead, I get a quaint letter in the mail telling me that my book has arrived (sometimes after I pick it up at the library because I was obsessively checking my online account to see if the book was there yet, so I found out before they could notify me).

Anyway, I finally had time to read the book a couple weeks ago, and I enjoyed it despite myself. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since Katherine Paterson wrote one of my favorite books while growing up, Jacob Have I Loved. I usually like happy endings, but for some reason, I’m okay with not having one in her books.

This post is my Blogging from A to Z entry for the letter G.

[F] Frindle by Andrew Clements

(#38 on School Library Journal‘s Top 100 Chapter Book Poll Results from 2012. This was first written for my History of Youth Literature class.)

My book for the letter “F” is Frindle by Andrew Clements (1996), which is about a boy named Nicholas (Nick) Allen who comes up with a new word and gets everyone at school to start using it. Eventually, it gets into the press and becomes a worldwide sensation, earning itself a spot in the dictionary.

I loved this book, even though I related more to the villain (the strict teacher that makes them use *gasp* the dictionary) than the kids. The way that the word spread worldwide and made Nick an extremely wealthy college student seemed a little unrealistic, but the idea that words have the meaning we give them is something that I wish all my students would be as excited about as Nick was. It reminded me of when I taught “Jabberwocky” to my students and showed them how the word “chortle” was listed in the dictionary as being coined by Lewis Carroll. Many of them already knew what the word meant, and they thought it was so cool that the first time it appeared in print was in the poem they were reading.

I wish I’d known about Frindle before, but I definitely want to teach it with “Jabberwocky” in a lesson sometime soon.

Also, I kept wondering why the illustrator’s name sounded so familiar, and then I realized that it was because Brian Selznick is the author of another Top 100 book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (which I’d checked out at the same time).

This post is my Blogging from A to Z entry for the letter F.