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With September now upon us, we are continuing our focus on Music in Children’s Literature with a new Book of the Month, over on the main PaperTigers website: A Song for Cambodia by Michelle Lord and illustrated by Shino Arihara (Lee & Low, 2006):

…the painful but inspiring true story of how music literally saved the life of Arn Chorn-Pond, founder of Cambodian Living Arts, a World Education project.

An orphan of the Khmer Rouge genocide in 1975, nine-year-old Arn was sent to a children’s work camp, where he was underfed and overworked, under the constantly watchful eye of armed and threatening soldiers. When volunteers were called for to play propaganda songs, Arn, who came from a family of musicians, raised his hand. He and five other children were chosen to learn the khim, a traditional Cambodian string instrument. Arn excelled… but once he had learned to play, his teacher and all but one of his fellow students were executed…

Read the complete review

Michelle has also contributed an insightful Personal View, Music as Inspiration and Survival: a Cambodian Journey - definitely worth reading!

Also new on the website, we are delighted to present an interview with husband-and-wife team Guo Yue and Clare Farrow, authors of the powerful and moving illustrated middle-reader, Little Leap Forward (Barefoot Books, 2008). In June I blogged about its powerful stage adaptation and in the interview Yue and Clare talk about it, as well as other aspects of the book.

Little Leap Forward is based on Yue’s childhood during the Cultural Revolution in China. His father, a professional erhu (two-string violin) player, died when Yue was very young; when Yue was seven, he began receiving flute lessons from one of his father’s friends, a musician who lived in the same small courtyard; then, at the age of seventeen, he joined an army music ensemble as a flutes soloist for the People’s Republic of China. With the help of one of his sisters, Yue left China in 1982 to take up a scholarship at the Guildhall School of Music in London. He now plays all over the world - and by following some of the links in the interview side-bar, you can listen to some examples of his beautiful music…

The new issue of PaperTigers, focusing on “Music in Children’s Literature,” is now live!

Music is central to the human experience and has been bound up with poetry and storytelling since time immemorial. We have brought together an international array of writers and artists whose lives and work have been touched by music; and whose work, in turn, reaches out across geographical boundaries to touch their audience.

As the final words of the opera Naomi’s Road say, “We’ll always carry with us these three things. Gift of music. Gift of words. Gift of love.”

We hope that you’ll find inspiration for all three of these gifts among our website’s new features, which include interviews with Joy Kogawa and Matt Ottley; gallery features of Lulu Delacre and Satoshi Kitamura’s work; essays by Jorge Luján and Michelle Lord, and more. Through September, we’ll continue to explore, here on the blog, the ways in which music features in children’s and young adult literature, so read the new features and let us know what you think by leaving a comment on this or any of our upcoming music-related posts!

Well I'm sorry to say it's the same old boring story, a snowballing renovation. We started out planning to fix our bathroom floor which had holes from replacing the dysfunctional clawfoot tub plumbing. It had vinyl tiles that were permanently stained and missing in some places. And we've ended by essentially gutting our bathroom and kitchen.

Given the asbestos tile underneath and the general bad condition of the floor in the kitchen we realized it would make sense to do both kitchen and bathroom floors at the same time. This was confirmed when we moved the old chest freezer left behind by the previous owner out of our closet and found mold, rust and a badly damaged patch of floor.

Our tiler had an opening in his schedule, so we hurried around and removed our old vanity from the bathroom and put the washing machine onto our deck. Then we emptied the lower kitchen cabinets which needed to come out, put the stove on the deck and our fridge in the living room.
We were so glad to see the old vanity go. And the best part is we left it outside with its old sink and faucet and someone took it - so we don't even have extra creating-more-garbage guilt.

So this is what our hallway looks like now. I love the look of the greyed floorboards, but they're not in great condition and there's tons of nailheads sticking up!
And this is what our bathroom floor looks like now. On Friday we found out that we'll need to have an extra material installed on top due to the poor condition of the floorboards.
(After ripping out and rebuilding the floor - the corner is really unstable and that's where we had the washing machine jumping around! We're now having Ditra installed throughout the kitchen and bathroom)
And this is now our kitchen:As you can see above, the cabinet didn't survive after all, as it was adhered with spray foam. Oddly enough. I guess they thought that fake-wood-plastic-laminate-particleboard cabinets would last forever! So we are now planning on buying new kitchen cabinets sooner than expected. The good news is pretty new cabinets, the bad news is of course the cost. Today we painted our clawfoot tub - since it was sitting in the hallway and finally accessible from all sides. This is the tub "before", rusty with a few layers of paint on two sides, in brown, blue, Pepto-Bismol pink and finally Big Bird yellow (this picture really doesn't do it justice):Luckily it is quite sound, the rust was superficial and the legs are still nice and sturdy. So I spent two hours sanding the tub, and finally started adding the cream-coloured Tremclad. This is a picture of the first exciting moment of covering this old uncared-for tub with glossy new paint:And finally, a lovely freshly painted tub:For some reason I love the raised letter label on the bottom of the tub:Transformations like this are so satisfying and remind us that it's worth all the work and expense. Well we think so anyway.