We’ve just had a seventh birthday celebration in our household. Little Brother was lucky: it was the week-end and he spent the whole day with his family. Not so poor little Graciela in Papi’s Gift (written by Karen Stanton and illustrated by Rene King Moreno) whose father is working in the United States to support his family back home. We don’t know the exact location but the gentle illustrations in soft pastels place the book in a Latino setting with many visual cultural references.
Graciela can’t have her father at home for her seventh birthday but she can at least have the parcel he sends to her… or so she thinks. But she waits and waits and the parcel never arrives. Papi cries at the other end of the phone – a very daring notion to include in a picture book, which really brings home the stress of separation for all involved. Graciela goes through many emotions – expectation turns to upset and then anger but, with her mother’s help, she emerges from the experience not unscathed but with hope in her heart.
In the same way that we feel Graciela will grow from the experience, young readers/ listeners (and this really is a book for sharing at a first reading), will find the story sobering and thought-provoking. They will empathise with the universality of her responses to what she has no control over; and they will question and learn about the reality of what life is like for some families, where separation is the only answer in order for them to survive.
There’s a great review of Papi’s Gift over at BookBuds and Picture Book of the Day recommends it as a springboard for a classroom writing activity.
Did I go see Poison last night? Why yes, yes I did. I rocked out in an awesome way. And luckily I work in a library, because I have a very quiet voice today. Screaming loudly all night long will do that to you...
It was a great weekend. Poison just put a nice big bow on it. Friday was my golden birthday,* and I treated myself to a day at the salon (I'm rocking a new cut and color. I'll post some pictures later) and then Dan and I went to see the Simpsons movie before meeting up with friends for drinks and dinner.
*True midwesterners will know what this means and will therefore divine how old I now am.
My parents gave me a hammock and so I spent Saturday enjoying that while reading the ever-exciting, yet very insightful, Managing Archival & Manuscript Repositories. I was planning on doing much of the same on Sunday, but it was rainy rainy rainy rainy. Bad for hammocking, good for my dry dry dry lawn and flowers. So I instead hung out on the couch. After awhile, I turned on the TV and guess what was playing? Right on the channel that was on? This Is Spinal Tap! How fitting! Then we saw POISON. Rock on.
Anyway, shall I talk about some books? I think I shall.
This weekend also saw me finishing the very fun
Red Scared!: The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture by Michael Barson and Steven Heller
This is not a history of communism (although it does offer plenty of that) nor is it pro- or anti- Commie. Instead, this is a light-hearted, but very well-researched, book about communism's role in American pop-culture.
It spends a lot of time looking the movies, books, news coverage, and pamphlets published and distributed during the twentieth century. Starting with reaction to the Russian revolution, and then moving to America's love affair with Russia during WWII and then the cold war proper and the COMMIE MENACE. It touches on the stories that took America by storm-- our love affair with J. Edgar Hoover, the McCarthy trials, and communism in Hollywood. It does not actually examine these issues in-depth but instead looks at how they American public perceived them and what type of news coverage they were getting at the time.
And that's the point of the book, how America perceived communism and what type of treatment it got in the news, as well as in our entertainment. It's a great look at these issues. Especially wonderful are the massive amounts of full-color illustrations of movie posters, book covers, comic books, trading cards and massive amounts of memorabilia and ephemera to illustrate everything...
Read the rest of this post
POPCORN!
10 points to anyone who gets that.
Keeping with the theme of random, here are some books I haven't reviewed yet. That's today's theme. I really need to catch up. I didn't start keeping notes until January and I'm still facing a backlog since September, so these are kinda short, because my memory isn't that long. Still, you get the last impression of a book. OK-- I've started writing this post. The "theme" has been narrowed a wee bit. These are all YA books that I liked. Not shout-from-the-roof-tops-love, but really enjoyed and liked.
Doing It by Melvin Burgess
This is hilarious, but not nearly as frothy-fun as I was expecting it to be. The basic premise is a bunch of British boys trying to get laid. One of them ends up boinking his teacher. One is obsessed with finding some action for Mr. Knobby Knobster. Burgess injects a lot of humor into this, but it's not the male equivelent of Georgia Nicolson. There are real issues here that are seriously dealt with, but it's not angst-ridden.
Eva Underground by Dandi Daley Mackall
This is a really interesting book about a teenager whose father is an organizer for the Polish Underground, so they move to Poland so he can, um, organize. It's a great look at fitting in to a new culture as well as life behind the Iron Curtain. I think it will really spark some further research in some readers, as you're never sure quite *when* it takes place until JPII gets elected Pope and everyone in Poland is super-excited. There were a few minor details that got me though-- one is a type towards the end where the printer switched Krakow and Warsaw, so that page made NO sense. The other is that she misses hanging out at Abercrombie and Fitch, even though that really wasn't a mall store until the late 90s. Just saying. Still, an awesome book.
Yellow Line by Sylvia Olsen
This is the first book I've read put out by Orca Soundings. This is a hi/lo line of books (high content level, low reading level). I was really surprised by how good it was. Vince lives in Pacific Canada in a small town near a First Nations reservation. The two ethnic groups (White and First Nation) segregate themselves everywhere-- in living, on the school bus. One on each side of a yellow line. Because this is a short book, things happen fast. Vince's friend and cousin, Sherry, starts dating someone who's First Nation. Vince develops a crush on a girl who is. The parents and some of Vince's friends are literally violently opposed to this idea. The plot comes quickly and there isn't a lot of character development, but it still sheds enough light on a heady topic and situation.
Red Kayak by Priscilla Cummings
This is really well written and is on several people's shout-off-the-roof list. The plot and characters just didn't grab me. I'm not sure why. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood the afternoon I read it. Anyway, Brady lives on the northern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. There are new people moving in, new development and McMansions going up. Fishing is threatened. Brady befriends the D'Angelo family, part of the new wave of people coming in. Brady's friends play an awful joke that ends in tragedy. Brady is then torn between doing the right thing and snitching on his friends. It's really well-done and not over-wrought, but still gives the situation the gravitas it needs.
Invisible by Pete Hautman
Dougie is a loner, an outcast, and really, a bit of a weirdo freak. His best friend Andy is athletic and popular. They don't hang out a lot at school but the next-door neighbors talk every night through their bedroom windows. It becomes apparent really quickly that Dougie is not the most reliable of narrators and there's something else going on. Or is it just that with YA fiction we now expect some sort of massive sixth-sense type twist? It was a good book, but I knew something was up way before it was revealed, so the last half of the book I was just thinking
what's going on already?!5 books in one post. And the grocery store now has cherries, so I know where I'm going after work.
Yes, my dinner tonight will be cheese and cherries and bread with olive oil. Yummy. I can't wait.
We’ve just had a seventh birthday celebration in our household. Little Brother was lucky: it was the week-end and he spent the whole day with his family. Not so poor little Graciela in Papi’s Gift (written by Karen Stanton and illustrated by Rene King Moreno) whose father is working in the United States to support his family back home. We don’t know the exact location but the gentle illustrations in soft pastels place the book in a Latino setting with many visual cultural references.
What a happy post, you sure sound like you had a wonderful weekend! lol, I have no idea what a golden birthday is, but I know a golden wedding anniversary is 50 years of marriage, so am I warm? :)
Thank you for the write up on "Red Scared", sometimes you can learn a lot about world systems when you view them through cultural icons like this book does.
Everyone guesses 50 out here on the East Coast, which is funny, because it's rather far from the truth.
I'll spill the beans though. Back where I come from (Wisconsin) your golden birthday is when you turn the age the date of your birthday is, so I turned 27 on the 27th. It was quite a good year though, as I turned 27 on 7/27/07, which is fun to say and numerically nice.