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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Grandfathers Journey, Most Recent at Top [Help]
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1. Top 100 Picture Books #46: Grandfather’s Journey by Allen Say

#46 Grandfather’s Journey by Allen Say (1993)
39 points

Love, love, love this book! Was so sad it didn’t make the list last time, I am moving it up on my list! Say’s illustrations are poetic and gorgeous. First time my pick won the Caldecott. - DeAnn Okamura

I love the elegance of this book – the detailed and formal illustrations, the spare and controlled text – but am sucker-punched every time by the final line. Very moving. - Emily Myhr

1993 – this beautiful book captures the dichotomy felt by dual nationals and many of my students [American school abroad]: “The funny thing is, the moment I am in one country, I am homesick for the other.” - Diantha McBride

As DeAnne rightly points out, Say’s Caldecott Award winner didn’t make the Top 100 Poll last time, much to my surprise.  Now it has crested the Top 50, and the love is certainly there.  Just last year Say earned a bit of additional attention thanks to his illustrated memoir Drawing From Memory. Could that have contributed to its appearance on the list now?  Let’s just say it probably didn’t hurt.

Publishers Weekly summarized the book in this way, “A portrait of Say’s grandfather opens the book, showing him in traditional Japanese dress, “a young man when he left his home in Japan and went to see the world.” Crossing the Pacific on a steamship, he arrives in North America and explores the land by train, by riverboat and on foot. One especially arresting, light-washed painting presents Grandfather in shirtsleeves, vest and tie, holding his suit jacket under his arm as he gazes over a prairie: “The endless farm fields reminded him of the ocean he had crossed.” Grandfather discovers that “the more he traveled, the more he longed to see new places,” but he nevertheless returns home to marry his childhood sweetheart. He brings her to California, where their daughter is born, but her youth reminds him inexorably of his own, and when she is nearly grown, he takes the family back to Japan. The restlessness endures: the daughter cannot be at home in a Japanese village; he himself cannot forget California. Although war shatters Grandfather’s hopes to revisit his second land, years later Say repeats the journey: “I came to love the land my grandfather had loved, and I stayed on and on until I had a daughter of my own.” The internal struggle of his grandfather also continues within Say, who writes that he, too, misses the places of his childhood and periodically returns to them.”

According to Anita Silvey’s 100 Best Books for Children, the pictures in this book came first.  The text?  Second.  And getting it to publication wasn’t easy.  “Reproducing that art, and keeping the colors clean and pure, proved extremely difficult; the publisher rejected three attempts to print the book.  Finally, Walter Lorraine, the editor; Donna McCarthy, the production manager; and Say decided on an innovative but effective production technique that helped capture the vibrancy of the colors.”

It won the Caldecott Medal in 1994, a particularly strong year if you consider the sheer number of Honors.  These included Ted Lewin’s Peppe the Lamplighter, Denise Fleming’s In the Small, Small Pond, Gerald McDermott’s Raven: A Trickster Tale from the Pacific Northwest, Kevin Henkes’ Owen, and Chris Raschka&rsq

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2. PaperTigers’ Global Voices feature with award winning author Holly Thompson (USA/Japan)~ Part 2

English-language Asia-set Children’s and YA Fiction ~ by Holly Thompson

Part 2 of 3 (read Part 1 here)

Some years back as we settled into our bicultural family life with young children here in Japan, although we were surrounded by books in Japanese and took full advantage of Japan’s healthy picture book and middle-grade market, we discovered that finding English-language reading material to support our bilingual children was no easy task. Because our children attended Japanese schools, English education happened in our home, and we needed a steady supply of English-language books. But libraries in Japan stock few English-language books, and bookstores here carry very few and at hefty mark-ups, so whenever friends or family visited from the U.S. they brought books to us. Returning from a trip back to the States, our luggage was always heavy with books. We book-swapped with families in Japan, we ordered from Scholastic with our English-after school group, and we pounced on book sale tables at international school fairs. At last, Amazon Japan with free and quick delivery of affordable overseas books came to the rescue.

Always on the lookout for books relating to our lives while raising our bilingual children, we soon became aware of a lack of English-language children’s books that reflect Japan. English-language picture books set in Japan were rare, and those that existed, we discovered, tended toward folktales and nonfiction. Where were the day-to-day stories that reflected the landscapes and people and value systems surrounding us? Where was Japan?

We treasured our Allen Say books, especially Kamishibai Man and Grandfather’s Journey.

We read and reread the bilingual Grandpa’s Town by Takaaki Nomura. We enjoyed folktale retellings like The Seven Gods of Luck by David Kudler and Yoshi’s Feast by Kimiko Kajikawa. and biographical works like Cool Melons—Turn to Frogs by Matthew Gollub. All excellent, but we were discouraged that such English-language titles set in Japan were few and far between.

Searching for other Asian cultures in English-language picture books yielded similar results—folktales, nonfiction and concept books, but few fictional stories set in Asia.

As the children grew older, we came to realize that even less common than English-language picture books set in Asia were English-language middle-grade and YA novels set in Japan and Asia. What we found was mostly historical fiction. Of course we read and loved Korea-set historical novels by Linda Sue Park, Japan-set novels by 0 Comments on PaperTigers’ Global Voices feature with award winning author Holly Thompson (USA/Japan)~ Part 2 as of 5/23/2012 10:49:00 AM

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