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LEE & LOW BOOKS celebrates its 25^th anniversary this year and to recognize how far the company has come, we are featuring one title a week to see how it is being used in classrooms today as well, as hear from the authors and illustrators.

Featured Title: Shining Star: The Anna May Wong Story

Author: Paula Yoo

Illustrator: Lin Wang

Synopsis: Born in 1905, Anna May Wong spent her childhood working in her family’s laundry in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Whenever she could afford it, Anna May slipped off to the movies, escaping to a world of adventure, glamour, and excitement. After seeing a movie being filmed in her neighborhood, young Anna May was hooked. She decided she would become a movie star!

Anna May struggled to pursue an acting career in Hollywood in the 1930s. There were very few roles for Asian Americans, and many were demeaning and stereotypical. Anna May made the most of each limited part. She worked hard and always gave her best performance. Finally, after years of unfulfilling roles, Anna May began crusading for more meaningful roles for herself and other Asian American actors.

Anna May Wong—the first Chinese American movie star—was a pioneer of the cinema. Her spirited determination in the face of discrimination is an inspiration to all who must overcome obstacles so that their dreams may come true.

Awards and Honors:

• Carter G. Woodson Award, NCSS
• Children’s Books of the Year, Bank Street College of Education
• Choices, Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC)

Resources for teaching with Shining Star:

• Video: Paula Yoo Interview 
• Video: Anna May Wong In Her Own Words from Women Make Movies
• Shining Star Reading and Craft Tips from Reading to Kids
• Toolkit for “I am Asian American” from Teaching Tolerance
• Asian Pacific American Heritage Teaching Resources from the Smithsonian
• “Anna May Wong Did it Right” from Time Magazine

Check out these Book Collections featuring Shining Star:

• Asian Pacific American Heritage Collection
• Asian/Asian American Collection Grades 3-5
• Women’s History Collection
• Biography and Memoir Grades 3-6 Collection
• Art and The Arts Collection
• California Books Collection

Book Activity: Create your own Hollywood Movie Star from Reading to Kids.

Have you used Shining Star? Let us know in the comments!

Celebrate with us! Check out the Lee & Low 25 Years Anniversary Collection.

Veronica has a degree from Mount Saint Mary College and joined LEE & LOW in the fall of 2014. She has a background in education and holds a New York State childhood education (1-6) and students with disabilities (1-6) certification. When she’s not wondering around New York City, you can find her hiking with her dog Milo in her hometown in the Hudson Valley, NY.

 

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Title: Ira’s Shakespeare Dream Written by: Glenda Armand illustrated by: Floyd Cooper Published by: Lee & Low, May 2015 Themes: African Americans, biography, Ira Aldridge, Shakespeare, acting, diversity, abolition of slavery in the USA Ages: 7-11+ Genre: Picture Book Biography Opening: IRA COULD NOT KEEP STILL as he waited in the balcony of … Continue reading →

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People often ask me, "What do you do to pass the time up there in New Hampshire?"

Well, when we're not cavorting with moose, celebrating the glories of our granite, and generally living free before we die, some of us make silly movies.

One that I was involved with is called Zombie Boy, which was written and directed by my friend Jamie Sharps. Against all odds, it now has distribution via MVD Media. It should be coming to various streaming platforms soon, and you can order the DVD from most of the places online where you'd order DVDs. (Here's the Amazon link, for instance.) There are even rumors of it showing up in some brick-and-mortar stores.

I've done lots of theatre acting (not so much in the last decade, for various reasons), but had mostly avoided film acting until Jamie called me up and asked me to play the role. I don't like watching myself, don't even like pictures of myself, so I never ached to be a movie actor. One of the prime attractions of theatre for me is that I don't have to see my performance. I said yes to Jamie because it sounded like fun, and he promised it would only be a few weeks of work. It was often fun (and sometimes not; those contact lenses are awful), but it definitely took longer than a few weeks. We spent most of one summer working on it, had a few days of filming that fall, then filmed for a few more days the next summer.

Despite my dislike of looking at myself, I don't mind watching this performance. Partly, that's because it's so over the top. I shamble, mug, and grunt for an hour and fifteen minutes. I watch the movie and I don't see me, so it's not discomforting. It's just some weird guy.

But also, for what it is, I think Zombie Boy is a pretty good movie. The genius of it is that it embodies its concept completely — from start to finish, it's a super-low-budget romp made by people who wanted to do nothing more than make a super-low-budget romp. There's a guy wearing a tattered bear-skin coat and not much else. There are incompetent ninjas. There's a doctor who speaks like a Werner Herzog version of the Swedish Chef. Why? Why not?



I can't tell you how many times I've watched the movie, from looking through the footage when we shot it to helping Jamie with a little bit of the editing to watching it at the local premiere (in the theatre where as a kid I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark and the first three Star Wars movies, among others, so it was quite a thrill) to showing it to various friends and family members. When I got the finished official DVD the other night, I sat down and watched it again from start to finish, for the first time just on my own. I had intended to watch only five or ten minutes to see how it looked in the MVD version. But I watched the whole thing. Partly because it was fun to see everybody again, fun to remember some of the amusing and/or arduous moments on set, but mostly just because it's great, stupid fun. Sure, there are awkward moments and clumsy moments, but that's part of what this movie is, part of the joy of it. There are also moments that are just ridiculously funny, and there's an energy to the whole that is infectious.

Well, I'm not going to review a movie I starred in (much as I'd like to, because after all, the political ontology the film limns is— okay, I'll stop). There's plenty that could be said about Zombie Boy. But perhaps nothing needs to be said. It is what it is, and, for me, what it is is something I'm thrilled and proud to have been part of.

After the premiere, a friend of mine slapped me on the back and said, "No matter what else you do, they're going to put Zombie Boy on your gravestone." I'm okay with that.

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Even though I recently turned sixty and have taught at colleges and conservatories, when I hear the words “back to school,” the image that springs to mind is of my teenage self as a Juilliard student in the 1970s. If I ask that self what my main educational breakthrough from those years was, the answer surprises me: discovering what actors learn. Actors study their own emotions.

The post Beyond the page: music students and emotion appeared first on OUPblog.

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In Ricki and the Flash, now in theaters, Meryl Streep plays an aging rocker, managing in her fourth decade atop the star pile to once again give us a character unlike any she has played before. Raymond Durgnat attests that, “the stars are a reflection in which the public studies and adjusts its own image of itself…The social history of a nation can be written in terms of its film stars.” So what does Streep’s capricious, unpredictable style reflect?

The post The mystery of Meryl Streep appeared first on OUPblog.

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Inspired by Stanley Wells' recent book on Great Shakespeare Actors, we asked OUP staff members to remember a time when a theatrical production of a Shakespeare play shocked them. We discovered that some Shakespeare plays have the ability to surprise even the hardiest of Oxford University Press employees. Grab an ice-cream on your way in, take a seat, and enjoy the descriptions of shocking Shakespeare productions.

The post Which Shakespeare performance shocked you the most? appeared first on OUPblog.

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Stanley Wells’ latest book, Great Shakespeare Actors, offers a series of beautifully written, illuminating, and entertaining accounts of many of the most famous stage performers of Shakespeare from his time to ours. In a video interview, Wells revealed some of the ‘lesser’ remembered actors of the past he would have loved to have seen perform live on stage. The edited transcript below offers an insight into three of these great Shakespeare actors.

The post Who are the forgotten Shakespearean actors? appeared first on OUPblog.

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by Marcie Colleen

“Show, don’t tell.”

We hear this all of the time. Yet, many writers struggle with this very idea.

Writers like to research. We travel to faraway places, we talk with people who live there. We look through old files and photographs. We mine our memories for tidbits and call upon our imagination to fill in the rest.

We stay cerebral.

But this is where we fail ourselves. This is where we fail our readers.

We all want to write books that make people feel, but in order to do that—we must feel first. We must cry. We must get angry. We must laugh. We must fall in love. We must face fear.

But to achieve true emotion with our words, we need to get out of our heads and tune into our guts.

To do this, I like to call upon the actor’s craft.

Here are 3 tips to get out of your writer’s head and write from the gut.

1. Keep an Emotion Diary.
   An actor knows that whatever happens to them in life is fodder for their craft. Even at a moment of extreme heartbreak, an actor knows, “I can use this.” Observe yourself on a daily basis. How are you feeling? Don’t detail the situations that are happening to you, but write down what an emotion feels like physically. Tune into your hands, your chest, your legs, and your jaw. These are places we hold emotion.
2. Be emotional.
   An actor practices playing with emotion. They take the time to experiment in order to better know how to portray it when the time comes. Much like a yogi will hold a pose to build strength, actors practice holding emotion in their bodies to gain emotional fluency. Refer back to your Emotion Diary to remember how a certain emotion manifests in your body. Soak in it. Go about some daily tasks while in this emotional state. (Although keep these tasks solo. You are working on craft here, not ruining relationships and getting a reputation. Hint: scrubbing the tub while angry is amazing!) Observe how the emotion affects your movement and your actions. Of course, when play time is done, find ways to unwind…we don’t want you to end up a basket case.
3. Embrace the First Person.
   An actor walks in the shoes of others to learn to live in their moments. They speak directly from the mouth, the heart, the gut of the very person they are performing. Spend some time pretending to be your character. You can go through the same emotional practice you did in the previous step, but this time with your character’s situation in mind.

Take your character to the most heightened moment in this emotion. How do they react? Write a letter or a diary entry as your character while holding this emotion. Or create audio or video as your character. Abandon flowery metaphor and other authorly devices for the time being and speak raw, from your character’s gut. You might be surprised what you learn.

It is so easy to fall into summarizing a scene instead of delving in and living each moment. Maybe as writers we prefer to play God and observe the tough situations from afar. It’s more pleasant to be omnipresent than personally absorbed.

But when we learn to write from the gut, our hands may tremble with each keystroke, a lump might form in our throat, tears might well. It’s not always comfortable. Yet it is essential that we learn to breathe life into each moment, so that the very DNA of our story can breathe on the page and fill the lungs of every reader it touches. This is the essence of “show, don’t tell.” In fact, it takes the idea one step further.

“Be, don’t show.”

Before Marcie Colleen was a picture book writer, she was a former actress, director and theatre educator. In her 15 year career, Marcie worked within the classroom, as well as on Regional, Off-Broadway and Broadway stages. Formerly the Director of Education for TADA! Youth Theater, she also worked for Syracuse Stage, Camp Broadway, the Metropolitan School for the Arts, and Tony Randall’s National Actors Theater. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Secondary Education and Theater from Oswego State University and a Masters degree in Educational Theater from NYU. She has taught theater workshops in the UK and throughout the US, including Alaska.

Marcie’s From the Gut: An Acting for Writers Workshop (being held on September 14th at NJ-SCBWI) helps writers get out of their heads. Her up-on-your-feet techniques feature acting and writing exercises to tap into raw emotion. Through guided practice, writers learn to breathe life into the voice of every character. Time is spent exploring, playing and simply “being” emotion while learning how to transfer the discoveries onto the page in a way that creates immediacy and authenticity for the reader. Participants are given tools to deepen their writing through voice and movement even when alone in their writing caves.

Visit Marcie at www.thisismarciecolleen.com.

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Disney's Frozen will soon merit its own chapter in the entertainment industry Big Book. The 2014 Oscar winner for best animated feature has earned over US$1 billion at the box office, currently the second highest-grossing animated feature in history, behind "Toy Story 3." The movie’s phenomenal financial success has obscured under-the-hood examination of its performance engine. As an acting teacher, I am an artistic purist; grosses and popularity awards don’t mean much to me. My standard of measurement is the emotional impact a movie has on its audience and its elegance as a work of art. "Frozen" is beautiful to see, fun to sing along with and is a modern day marketing marvel, but the script has structural and performance issues that are worth examining because they impact directly on acting.

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By Bart van Es

The death of Richard Burbage in 1619 caused a minor scandal. So lavish was the outpouring of grief that it threatened to overshadow official mourning for Queen Anne who had died a few days before. Shakespeare’s leading actor had a legendary status in the seventeenth century. It is also a minor scandal that he is not more famous today. While there is exhaustive scholarship on the playwright’s texts and sources, the earliest manuscript elegies for the man who first performed Hamlet, Lear, and Othello remain unedited and obscure. This is a shame not only because it is an injustice but also because it stops us seeing the way Shakespeare worked.

It was the first performance of Hamlet around 1601 that projected Burbage into the national imagination. The earliest surviving elegy begins by saying that there will be ‘no more young Hamlet’ after the death of the star:

Oft I have seen him leap into a grave
Suiting the person, which he seemed to have,
Of a sad lover, with so true an eye
That there (I would have sworn) he meant to die.

A 1605 pamphlet notes how the ‘one man’ who plays Hamlet stands at the apogee of his profession, with ‘money’, ‘dignity’, and ‘reputation’ that are destined to earn him a ‘lordship in the country’. The play was ‘diverse times acted by his highness’s servants in the City of London as also in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere’. It functioned as the calling card of its leading man.

Hamlet proved the making of Burbage, but I suggest that Burbage also had a good deal to do with the way Hamlet was made. Three things about the actor were essential. First, his wealth and playhouse investment. Second, his style of performance. Third, competition with the leading man of a rival company, Edward Alleyn.

Wealth is important because power (just as in modern Hollywood) did not come from talent alone. Before 1599 Burbage had been just one in an acting company of eight equals and his roles in Shakespeare’s plays were commensurate with that stake. But the building of the Globe in 1599 made Richard newly preeminent. He and his brother Cuthbert secured 50% of the venture, with Shakespeare and the four other ‘housekeepers’ having just 10% each. Burbage’s business dominance had immediate implications. Once Burbage was a bigger investor, the company’s playwright wrote him bigger parts. From this point on central characters become more prominent: Henry V, Duke Vincentio, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Antony, and Coriolanus (all products of the early Globe years) are not simply longer in their line-counts, they are also grander, more self-defining, roles. Most can be linked with certainty to Burbage and all are very likely to have been played by him. Hamlet (at 1338 lines) is by some measure the largest part in the Shakespeare canon and that statistic connects pretty directly with the actor’s business share.

Of course, Burbage was not just powerful but also gifted. Ben Jonson called him the ‘best actor’ and that reputation was founded, as one elegy put it, on performing ‘so truly to the life’. According to the testimony of Richard Flecknoe:

He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tiring house) assumed himself again until the play was done: there being as much difference betwixt him and one of our common actors as between a ballad singer who only mouths it and an excellent singer.

This distance from common actors is vital to Hamlet because it makes possible the Prince’s declaration that ‘forms, moods, shapes of grief’ are merely ‘actions that a man might play’ but that he ‘has that within which passes show’.

A final element, though, was the rivalry between Burbage and Alleyn. Exactly like Burbage, Alleyn was an actor who had recently become a big-scale playhouse investor. In 1600 he built the Fortune playhouse to the north of the city, deliberately copying the Globe. To launch his theatre Alleyn revived the roles that had made him famous in the early 1590s: Tamburlaine, Faustus, and other leads in Marlowe plays. Amongst these was Marlowe’s Dido, in which he spoke the following lines:

At last came Pyrrhus, fell and full of ire,
His harness dropping blood, and on his spear
The mangled head of Priam’s youngest son…

In Hamlet (written while Alleyn conducted these revivals) the Prince meets a player and requests an old speech that has a very similar ring:

The rugged Pyrrhus like th’ Hyrcanian beast…
—’Tis not so. It begins with Pyrrhus.
The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble…

Burbage, at the Globe, was pretending awkwardly to remember lines that closely resembled those of his rival on the other side of the Thames. The unpopularity of the ‘tragedians of the city’ (which has forced the player to travel to Elsinore) thus becomes a very local affair.

The player’s long speech (which ‘pleased not the million’ and bores Polonius) is partly a dig at Alleyn, but it is also something more complex. Hamlet admires the old player and behind this there is surely also admiration for Alleyn, with whom Burbage had learned his craft as a travelling actor a decade before.  His character’s inability to ‘drown the stage with tears, / And cleave the general ear with horrid speech’ is an expression of limitation. But it also announces a new kind of acting in which the feelings of characters are not so easily known. Alleyn had starred as Cutlack the Dane with eyes of ‘lightning’ and words of ‘thunder’; Burbage would command the stage in a different way. ‘To be or not to be’ was a question of acting method. The performer whose death Thomas Middleton would describe as an ‘eclipse of playing’ had an artistic vision of his own.

Bart van Es is Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He has previously written books on Edmund Spenser and has a special interest in the writing of history in the Renaissance. Shakespeare in Company is his first work on drama and was supported by the award of an AHRC Fellowship.

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Image credit: Portraits of Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn used with permission of Dulwich Picture Gallery. All rights reserved. 

The post Richard Burbage: Shakespeare’s first Hamlet appeared first on OUPblog.

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On this Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful for my brother Richard. He died earlier this month. He loved his wife Val, his daughter Emily, and his birth family. He also loved acting, cooking, and laughing. Rich is the one in blue. His obituary follows. It does a good job of speaking about his life. Rich will be missed by many.


  

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The preconception, on the part of critics and actors alike, regarding cinematic theatricality as a marker of feeling—a prejudice in favor of one particular school and method of acting—remains as much an obstacle to creation as to appreciation.

—Richard Brody 

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Why does everything take so long? Um . . . maybe because I put it off forever?

But today my choices were clean off my desk (never) or finally update my Book Store (okay, yes). So what you’ll find there are not just some random selection of novels, biographies, science books, food books, etc., but an actual thought-out list of recommendations for some great reading in a bunch of different categories.

What have I read most recently that I absolutely loved? Why, Judi Dench’s memoir, of course. If you’re a fan of Dame Judi–and really, how can you not be?–then you’ll enjoy her book AND FURTHERMORE, even though those of us who aren’t British may not be as familiar with all the names she drops from her days in the Royal Shakespeare Company and all that. But I’ll tell you what, thanks to her memoir (which I’m now re-reading a week after I finished it, because I just want to), I’m on a Judi Dench movie kick lately. This weekend it was CASINO ROYALE and QUANTUM OF SOLACE, because even though Dame Judi was fabulous as Queen Elizabeth in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, really there’s nothing better than watching her as M in the James Bond flicks.

And thanks to one of her scenes in QUANTUM OF SOLACE, I really want to start answering the phone, “What is it?” That’s right, Judi, make them get right to the point.

The other book I’m absolutely rabid about right now is Laura Hillenbrand’s UNBROKEN: A WORLD WAR II STORY OF SURVIVAL, RESILIENCE, AND REDEMPTION. That book will amaze, horrify, and most likely change you. I’ll tell you one thing, it certainly makes you want to stop complaining about every little thing in your life. I listened to the audio book on a long car drive recently, and it not only made the miles fly by, it also made it a little dangerous at one point because I was crying so hard I probably should have pulled over. Sorry, Safety Monitors. But that book was so inspiring I’m probably going to read the print version next, because I really need to experience it again.

Both the Judi Dench memoir and the Laura Hillenbrand biography can be found in my book store under the category “Burly Adventurers Who Inspire Me.” Because you don’t have to be a mountain climber to make it into that group–you just have to lead a remarkably bold and fearless life.

My final current recommendation, listed under “Favorite Books on Writing,” is James A. Owen’s DRAWING OUT THE DRAGONS: A MEDITATION ON ART, DESTINY, AND THE POWER OF CHOICE. Owen is the bestselling author and illustrator of the CHRONICLES OF THE IMAGINARIUM GEOGRAPHICA series, starting with HERE, THERE BE DRAGONS. His new book grew out of the inspirational talks he gives to middle school and high school students, encouraging them to pursue their dream of being writers and artists. I’m already pursuing that dream, but dang if I wasn’t re-inspired. It’s like one of my other favorites, Stephen King’s ON WRITING, but without the drugs.

So there! Another item I can mark off my to-do list! Now what else can I do instead of cleaning my office?

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With being an actor, comes certain responsibilities that you might not have asked for in the first place. Like one of them that almost all actors have to deal with on a daily basis is: Being famous. 

You may be thinking, but being famous would be an advantage right? Well, being famous has it’s advantages but it also has disadvantages. One of the disadvantages is of course, fame. Fame brings many things to you, that you might not want. Like for instance, people following you around trying to get a good picture of you or trying to exploit you like the many reporters do to make a quick buck. You have to be careful about what you wear, what you do, how you act, and sometimes you can’t even be yourself around other people. Another disadvantage about being an actor/actress would be the competition for jobs. You have to really try and try to get good at acting and if you don’t get a job then it will discourage you or if you can’t get enough jobs then you might not make enough cash. The thing is, you have to really compete with other people to get a good job like the one for the Harry Potter movies or the Twilight movie. Both earned millions and millions of dollars but also both were great movies. If you get to be in a great movie, you have a chance to get fame and money. But acting can be a tedious career because of the fame and competition.

But, being famous has it’s advantages. Now not all these advantages are, what people say, ethnically Correct. You can use your fame to sway people choices in life, or make them believe in what they didn’t believe in before. Also, fame has it’s advantages money wise, the money can be used to help people or even the economy. Like for example, the actor Will Smith donated a large amount of money to assist Katrina victims. He also donated $4,600 to the presidential campaign of Democrat Barack Obama. - Told to me by my friend, Krause.

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Being an actor can be extremely fun though. After watching countless hours of interviews with different actors by reporters, I find out how fun being an actor can really be. Like for example, in the movie “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince”, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson, has tons of fun playing the main characters. I’ve watched a lot of different interviews between these three actors in general because they seem to have a lot of experience in acting and has tons of fun on set. Now not all movies can be as fun as Harry Potter, so I’ve watched other actor interviews from different movies like “Transformers 2″ and “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull”. 

I for one, have no acting experience except for high school drama class. So, I might not be the best one to judge if it is worth it or not, but it definitely can be a great career to take. Now for the pros and cons about being an actor.

Pros:

• Money
• Friends
• Fun Career
• Fans

Cons:

• Paparazzi
• Fame
• Rumors
• Exploiting

These pros and cons may vary from different actors but that’s mainly what I see the pros and cons about being an actor is.

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Wow. Just wow. Read it. Technorati Tags: Acting, Never Stopping, Publishing, Quitting, Singing, Succeeding, Writing

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Where I've Been:
Sunday in the City with my mother and daughters to see EQUUS
I was inches away from Daniel Radcliffe yesterday
That does not sound right. (No naked jokes inserted here, please.) {}
Radcliffe is an amazing actor, starring on Broadway in a revival of EQUUS
I was not familiar with the story and had few expectations (except the promotional buzz of Radcliffe's nude scenes)
But his acting left his flesh exposed and unclothed from the first moment he appeared until the end of the play (when, ironically, he is wrapped in a blanket and protected from what he has been through)
That story peels open, like a curtain rising in slow-motion, more and more of the set and sound and pain and beauty revealed as the peep-hole becomes the panaroma
And that story
The juxtaposition of what one confronts to understand our life and our actions
and whether healing and making something and someone whole is always the answer
That's how I want to write. Completely inside the heads of the action
and the actors. Feeling as if the story is yours as you stare through the small opening of the telescope and watch the great sky in wonder.
Spellbinding
Powerful
Charming
and while he will always have "Harry" to thank for his theatrical career,
it is Radcliffe's talent that will take him wherever he wants to go, no matter how long he chooses to
put it ALL out there on the stage
(I told you. No naked jokes.)



After the show, we waited near the front of the rope line and waved as he signed autographs for the manic fans. My daughters could not get close enough and their disappointment in not getting to see him truly eye-to-eye was the only downer of the day. My older daughter wrote a charming fan note to Daniel Radcliffe many years ago when he first became famous. We never mailed the letter. I don't know why. I have it, somewhere. I know what it feels like to be close to someone, close enough to feel a kinship and too far away to touch in real life. And if you could, what do you say? Thank you? I love you? Sign my ticket? No. Sometimes, it's just better to watch someone do what they do from afar. Naked or not. (The actor and the audience both.)

"That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped - when did you?'"

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King of Shadows by Susan Cooper. Personal copy. Read for the Scholar's Blog Book Discussion. This discussion took place in February of 2007; I'm going thru old books that I enjoyed but didn't post about when I read.

The Plot: Present-day Nat is a teenager and actor who is in a staging of one of Shakespeare's Plays. Then, boom! Time slip happens and he's back in the day, meeting the real Bard.

The Good: I love time slip novels. I love Shakespeare.

Nat meets Shakespeare and they bond. Nat's father is dead; and Nat sees Shakespeare as a quasi father figure.

OK, true confession time: when I read the Nat/Shakespeare relationship, I thought, "hm. gay." There was something about the intensity of Nat's feelings towards Shakespeare that just seemed -- well, not as a son to a father. Or a friend to a friend. And I thought, OK, that's just my reading, I've read too much slash fanfiction. But then I saw that Roger thought the same thing!

Tho, part of my reading may also be because of Susan Cooper and Hume Cronyn. I think this, in a way, is her love story to him; with SC's feelings about HC projected onto Nat's feelings for WS.

Anyway, I also liked this book because of the theatre! angle, a world that Cooper knows. The present day theatre, trying to recreate the Shakespeare plays; and then the world of Shakespeare, putting them on for the first time.

Arby's word convey the heart of this book: "Nothing is more important than the company; nothing is more important than the play." Is it the people or the play that is more important?

Final worlds: I was really, really frustrated by the non-explanation for the timeslip. It turns out that Babbage/ Burbage sends Nat back in time to save WS; but it never explains how B/B manages to learn the secrets of a long life/ time travel.

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There are so many different approaches you can take if you want to expand upon The Silk Princess (Picture Book)with your child. Here are just a couple:

Legends, Myths, and Folktales

• If your child enjoys these types of stories, why not read more of them? Your public library probably has a lot of them, and as Marian the Librarian points out, kid’s lit is chock full of them Check out her post for a long list of recent books that feature mythological characters.
• Consider having a themed week where you read your favorite myths, legends, and folktales. You can even tell your own favorite stories
• Create a book with your child featuring his/her favorite characters or stories

Ancient China
The possibilities are virtually endless when it comes to learning more about Ancient China. Here are a few ideas:

• Ancient Chinese Culture

Go to your local library, and check out a few books about the Ancient Chinese culture. Discuss religion, clothing, food, and customs. Kids may be interested in the history of China, the emperors and the dynasties. The Great Wall of China and the Silk Road may be interesting topics.

• Arts and Crafts

Here are some arts and crafts I found online. You and your child can make a circly snake or a Chinese lantern.

• Ancient China Month

A friend of mine sometimes has a themed month with her children. Along with her children, she chooses a country or culture to learn about for the month. They go to the library and check out different books, try different recipes a couple of nights during that month, and then try to find and visit local exhibits featuring that culture. Her kids seem to really enjoy it and have developed a deep respect for different cultures. The most impressive thing is that she makes it fun…the kids don’t feel like they’re in school. This could easily be scaled down to “Ancient China month.”

Books of Interest

Bound--A Chinese Cinderella story for Young Adults

Stories From The Silk Road--A collection of folktales from different countries along the Silk Road

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The Silk Princess written and illustrated by Charles Santore
Reading level: Ages 4-8
Hardcover: 40 pages
Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers (December 26, 2007)

I’ve always loved legends, folktales, fairytales, and myths. As a child, I loved reading about Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan. I had a big yellow book filled with fairytales, and I remember my favorite being Snow White and Rose Red. I also had a book of myths where I read stories of Zeus, Aphrodite, and Poseidon. The Furies and Medusa terrified me, and I felt so sad for Persephone when she was destined to a live in the Underworld. In college, I first read Beowulf and The Iliad. And don’t get me started about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Some of my favorite books I’ve read in my adult life are Marian Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon series. (except for Ancestors of Avalon, which I couldn’t even finish…ugh).

I love traditional literature because I love the idea of oral histories—of stories being passed down through many generations. I love the magic, the stories, the mysterious and often larger than life characters, the dangerous situations, and the mostly happy endings.

I was very excited when I saw The Silk Princess, a legend about the discovery of silk in ancient China. Hsi-Ling Chi, the Emperor’s daughter, plays second fiddle to her brothers. Her father rarely notices her, and she spends most of her day in the palace gardens with her mother. It was on one of these days when she saw a silkworm’s cocoon fall into her mother’s tea, causing it to unravel. Her mother suggests that she find out how long it is, and the delighted Hsi-Ling Chi takes one end of the thread and begins to walk.. Soon she’s out of the gardens and eventually outside of the palace, where even her mother has never been. But Hsi-Ling Chi is not afraid and continues walking. It is during this dangerous journey that she discovers the magic of the silkworms and is finally able to win her father’s attention with beautiful silk fabric.

The Silk Princess is based on the legend of Chinese Emperor Huang-Ti, the Yellow Emperor whose wife discovers how to make silk when a cocoon falls into her tea, causing it to unravel. In the end notes, Santore explains that the wife was sometimes called Lei-Tsu and sometimes called Hsi-Ling Chi, so he decided to put both in his story and create two characters—the Empress Lei-Tsu and her daughter Hsi-Ling Chi.

The Silk Princess has everything I like in a good folktale—magic, mysterious characters, danger, and a happy ending. Santore’s striking water colors are full of detail and paint a beautiful picture of life in Ancient China, from the traditional clothing to the palace. There is one scene where Hsi-Ling Chi encounters a dragon on a bridge, and a tiny Hsi-Ling Chi is holding her shoes in her hand, running from the dragon. The enormous dragon looks just like how I would imagine a dragon in ancient China to look.

A longer picture book with complex sentences, this book is more suited as a read aloud for younger children. Children who are beginning readers may stumble over some of the language such as, “Regal in his bearing, he reigned in splendor,” but it’s this type of language that is only fitting to describe an Emperor. When we actually get into Hsi-Ling’s story, the vocabulary gets simpler, but there is still a lot of text.

If you’re looking for a good folktale or legend to read to your child, The Silk Princess is a good choice, and don’t let the title fool you—I think both boys and girls would be interested in the book, especially the part with the dragon.

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