Book of the Week: Knit Together

Knit Together

by Angela Dominguez
Dial, 2015
32 pages
ISBN: 9780803740990
Ages 3-7

A little girl who loves to draw wishes she could also knit, like her mom. Her mother tries to teach her, but it turns out to be harder than it looks. When the girl gets discouraged, her mom points out that the little girl’s drawings have inspired many of her knitting projects and suggests that they collaborate. After a day at the beach the little girl puts crayons to paper. “We talk about our project. And then we work to make something we could never have made alone.” The result is functional art: a blanket featuring a beach-inspired design originally drawn by the girl. The bond of this dynamic mother-daughter duo is obvious in a warm, engaging picture book that also offers insight into creativity and collaboration. Both the fairly spare narrative and the illustrations are full of personality, warmth and charm. (It’s particularly fun to notice the ways the mother’s knitting reflects many of her daughter’s drawings even prior to their partnership.)  © 2015 Cooperative Children's Book Center

Book of the Week: George

George

by Alex Gino
Published by Scholastic Press, 2015
240 pages
ISBN: 9780545812542
Ages 8-11

A girl born into a boy’s body, ten-year-old George hasn’t yet confided this truth to anyone. Then she decides to try out for the part of Charlotte in the fourth grade’s dramatization of Charlotte’s Web. George thinks the play will be a vehicle to let her mom know that she’s really a girl, not a boy. But Charlotte is also the part that she wants because she loves the character. George finally tells her friend Kelly the truth, and after Kelly is cast as Charlotte, she and George conspire to have George play Charlotte in the second performance. By then George has told both her mom and her older brother. Both of them had assumed George was gay, and while George’s brother looks at George as if she finally makes sense to him, George’s mom is struggling. Alex Gino’s warm debut novel is a pitch-perfect story for younger middle grade. Substantial without a hint of heaviness, the almost lighthearted tone offers a matter-of-fact presentation of George’s identity, leaving room for the delightful development of characters and the plot around Kelly and George’s plan. The support Georges receives from Kelly, from her brother, and from the school principal, as well as the range of responses of others, are all realistic. But all of the characters are more than their responses, just as George is more than her gender. She’s George, a girl with many interests delighting in chances to outwardly express an elemental aspect of her identity.  © Cooperative Children's Book Center

Overboard? Overthinking? Making Choices

Here at the CCBC we are constantly reading and evaluating the new books that arrive on a daily basis. We discuss some of the books face-to-face in a monthly discussion group open to anyone who wants to attend. But there are many, many more books that we discuss just among the four of us as we consider books that we will eventually select for our annual publication, CCBC Choices. 

Much as we all wish we could just sit at our desks and read all day, there's not enough time for that, so we do the bulk of our reading at home, in the evenings and on weekends. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, we are able to discuss these books as we read them via a running Google Doc, where we indicate our yes, no and maybe votes for inclusion in CCBC Choices. Unless we have four yes votes or four no votes, we also discuss all these books again face-to-face in order to make our final decisions. There are always some books, such as Under a Pig Tree by Margie Palatini, where we decide we need outside opinions, either from our monthly discussion group or from a content expert.

Although our Google Doc discussions are in-house and not intended for public consumption, we thought it would be helpful to get some opinions on this book from our blog readers, so we've decided to share it here. We all really liked the book a lot and admired the humor of the the running joke ("fig" is mistaken for "pig"), and the way it plays out in the artwork. But there were two illustrations that raised questions, one serious and one not. Here are the two pictures that prompted in-house discussion. The discussion itself has been cut and pasted from the Google Doc immediately below the two pictures.

Palatini, Margie. Under a Pig Tree: A History of the Noble Fruit. Ill by Chuck Groenik. Abrams

MS: Yes. Hysterical!

MVL:  Yes.   I must be missing the joke on the page that reads “Some pigs are very popular and quite famous, such as Blanche, Celeste, Len, and Tena. Of course, everyone knows Judy.”  Blanche, Celeste, and Tena all appear to be types of figs.  But Len and Judy?  I’m thinking there’s some wordplay there that’s zooming over my head.

KT: Maybe. I love this but was taken aback by the pig wearing a hijab, since pigs are forbidden in Islamic cultures.  Maybe I’m going overboard but I thought that was culturally insensitive on the part of the illustrator. In terms of the celebrity pigs I don’t get Len either, but the Judy is the Garland fig (and that was my favorite picture of all. It made me laugh out loud.)

MS: Thanks for pointing that out, KT. I did notice the priest pig, which I thought some would find offensive on principle, but the Muslim pig slipped by me.  And the point is different and I think important to think about. It’s a representation issue that violates a belief in Islam that pigs are haraam---they are truly considered filthy and so to represent a Muslim that way--yikes!  (It would be the same to see a Hasidic Jew represented as such). I do love the humor in this book, but I think that is an unintentional and unfortunate oversight.

Later:  Ok. I looked again.  I think that the hijab isn’t a hijab but is meant to represent Cleopatra (her hair) for “Egyptian fig.”  (That whole page spread gave me pause re. cultural representation on my initial read-- all of it is stereotypical/tongue in cheek.  But I took Cleo for Cleo and not a hijab which is why I didn’t remember a hijab. But the fact that KT and I disagree on this interpretation makes it still potentially problematic as I can clearly be taken as a hijab.)  Re. types of figs: Len and Judy are also types of figs. I’m not sure who each is supposed by be as represented beyond “Judy Garland” as KT noted. Is Blanche Blanche DuBois? Celeste looks like Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s--?. “Len” and “Tena”--?  (Way overthinking this page.)

***

We'd love to know what you all think.  Cleopatra or hijab? And who is Len?

Book of the Week: The Bear Ate Your Sandwich

The Bear Ate Your Sandwich

 

by Julia Sarcone-Roach

Alfred A. Knopf, 2015
32 pages
ISBN: 978-0-375-85860-4
Ages 3-6 


“It all started with the bear.” An unknown narrator weaves an impossible story to account for someone’s missing lunch in a picture book pairing a straightforward narrative with beautifully realized illustrations made whimsical by their impossibility. The bear, it seems, fell asleep in the back of a truck full of berries and ended up in a new forest (a city), where he found “climbing spots” (e.g., fire escapes, clothes lines between buildings), “good bark for scratching” (a brick-sided building), and “many interesting smells” (garbage cans). Eventually the bear got hungry, and there was the sandwich, all alone in the midst of leafy green (on a bench in a park). An already delightful story takes an even more waggish turn in its final pages when the identity of the speaker and subject are revealed: a small black dog (somewhat bear-like) pouring out the tall tale to a now lunch-less little girl. The warm, colorful acrylic and pencil illustrations are superb, their realistic accounting of the bear’s adventure will be a source of glee for young readers and listeners, as will the play between narrative and art. ©2015 Cooperative Children’s Book Center

Asian-American Writers Take on Race

It's something we've been wondering about here at the CCBC for the past year or so, ever since we noted that our statistics reveal that fewer Asian-American book creators write and illustrate books about Asian characters than they do about white (or animal) characters.  With such a dearth of books with Asian main characters, why don't more Asian authors and illustrators create them?

In a year when we celebrated so much diversity in the ALA Award choices, it doesn't escape our attention that the three Asian-American authors and illustrators who were honored this year won for books that didn't feature any Asian characters. This year's Caldecott Medal winner by the prolific Thai-American artist, Dan Santat, is a case in point.  Beekle is about a raceless imaginary friend and, although the people he meets in the real world are diverse, the girl who eventually adopts him appears to be white. 

Jillian Tamaki won a Caldecott Honor for This One Summer, a realistic graphic novel that perfectly captures a summer friendship between two girls during the time when one is beginning to outgrow the other. Both the illustrator and the author are Japanese American, but the book, as far as I can tell, features an all-white cast. 

Interior from This One Summer

And author Anna Kang won the Geisel Award this year for You Are (Not) Small, a book with bear characters standing in for humans. In spite of the fact that the book has no human, let alone Asian, characters, the author talked about how the book was influenced by her own Korean-American heritage in her eloquent acceptance speech last month.  So who's to say if a book by an Asian-American author is Asian or not?

With all that in mind, we were pleased to see this eye-opening blog post by Zetta Elliott in which she asks several prominent Asian-American writers to discuss this issue. Their responses give us a lot of food for thought. 

Book of the Week

Bone Gap

by Laura Ruby

Balzer + Bray / HarperCollins, 2015
345 pages
ISBN: 978-0-06-231760-5

Age 14 and older


Teenage Finn is the only person in Bone Gap who believes Roza, a young woman relatively new to town, was abducted. Finn is sure Roza was a prisoner in the car he saw her riding in, but he can’t describe the driver. Everyone else thinks he made up the story and was in love with Roza. In truth, Finn’s older brother Sean is the one in love with Roza, and Finn feels increasingly frustrated by Sean’s distant behavior and seeming lack of concern: Sean clearly assumes Roza left Bone Gap—and him—of her own accord. When the point of view of this exquisitely written novel switches to Roza, who is, indeed, being held prisoner, the story takes on the overtones of a thriller, one that slips into the realm of magical realism as Roza’s storyline develops. Defying all boundaries, Laura Ruby moves assuredly back and forth between small town life in Bone Gap, where Finn is marked by loss that precedes the present events and finds unexpected friendship and solace in a developing relationship with classmate Petey, and Roza’s ever-more-complex history and situation. Roza is strikingly beautiful. Petey is often seen as remarkable for her lack of beauty. Neither woman can be defined by her appearance—one of the story’s many points. Themes of small town life, family, loss, love, evil, beauty, sexuality, power and its abuse all resound in a story that can be read, among many ways, as a feminist fairy tale.  © Cooperative Children's Book Center

Book of the Week

The World in a Second

by Isabel Minhós Martins
Illustrated by Bernardo P. Carvalho
Translated from the Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann 

 

 
U.S. edition: Enchanted Lion, 2015
56 pages
ISBN: 978-1592701575
Ages 6-11

“While you turn the pages of this book, the world doesn’t stop…” A picture book that begins and ends with an awareness of the book itself as both physical object and source of engagement also launches reader’s and listeners on a journey around the world, offering glimpses of things happening at the same moment in time. A boat tossed by a storm in the Baltic Sea, passengers stuck on an elevator in New York City, a soccer ball flying toward a window in Greece, a man resting on a bench in Tokyo, a thief entering a home (perhaps his own, it’s playfully noted) in Pescara, Italy. The location of these and other scenarios isn’t always stated or obvious, but the detailed, stylized illustrations offer many intriguing, and sometimes revealing, things to look at, while each two-page spread is numbered. A world map at the end identifies the locale of each numbered scene, along with the time in that location at the moment (e.g, 9:32 a.m. in Buenos Aires, 9:32 p.m. in Tokyo). The final scene, of a girl on a bed reading, states, “…And a book reaches the end.” A book ripe for discussion offers added appeal for kids who love pouring over details. ©2015 Cooperative Children’s Book Center