How to use this Page

This blog is now closed.  I'll be closing comments here, at Big A little a, as well as the [email protected] address.  You can always reach me at [email protected].

I'm taking a new approach to discussing books online. I'll be blogging books in shorter formats at Crossover Books on Tumblr and on Pinterest ().  I won't be running either feed through Facebook or Twitter, so it might take me awhile to find everyone.

Finally, I'll still be blogging for the Working Group for the Study of Russian Children's Literature and Culture  and with my students on a variety of course blogs.

See you all soon and thanks for reading.

be blogging here at Big A little a. I will keep the blog up for archival reasons, but please come visit me at my new blog, Crossover.

I'm taking one more day off the blog--a day to catch up, to answer e-mails (Anne, Cyn, interview coming soon!), organize all areas of my life. This is a good week for catch up, though: The Summer Blog Blast Tour is taking the kidlitosphere by storm. Catch the details at Chasing Ray and I'll see you all for Poetry Friday.

In the meantime, I have some blogroll administration to take care of. Is your children's literature or book blog missing from my list? Please do let me know in the comments! (Other bloggers use these lists too, so don't be shy. I've been very distracted the past few weeks, so I know I've missed a number of great new blogs.)

Did you know there's a blog devoted to blog quotes? Well, there is. It's called Blogtations and it's a fascinating endeavor. And, I was quoted today!
-----------------
The Children's Book Review wiki is chugging along, with new reviews being added daily. Thank you all for contributing and making CBR a great resource for readers. I do want to emphasize that Children's Book Review wiki is a resource for the community and not my project. So any and all suggestions and improvements (and, yes, even complaints) are welcome.

-----------------

Call for Help: And speaking of Children's Book Reviews...its existence has spawned a new creation called Redux Review. You see, the centralized wiki resource has inspired more than one author to ask me whether or not a print review of their book could be archived as well. So...in order to make this happen, a new blog was born. I've sent letters to journals asking for permission to post published reviews of individual books, and two journals (so far) have agreed! Reviews will only be posted upon request of the author, illustrator, or a reader and only by permission of the publisher.

Here's where I'm looking for help: 1) A co-blogger or co-bloggers: Someone who is willing to throw a review up there once or twice a week; 2) Graphics: I'd love a cool black-and-white header for the blog, ideally with an image of one of those old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape players.
-------------------------
I missed Non-Fiction Monday this week, but you can find all the fabulous entries at Anastasia Suen's place.

It's time for me to update my blogrolls. If you know a good blog I'm missing, let me know in the comments. (And, yes, please tell me about your own children's literature blog. There are so many new ones lately, I've lost track.)

by William H. Armstrong. 1970 Newbury Award winner. It was made into a movie in 1972 and redone by Disney in 2003.

This is a classic story that I first read in Jr. High. I was in a mixed suburban school near Cleveland Ohio. The story is set in the American south in the 1930s and tells about a black sharecropper family's tragic struggle for survival in the face of intensely cruel racism and violence. I remember thinking that is was very far away and outside of the norms for our lives. I wonder now if the white teacher and the other students in my class, both black and white felt that way too.

Thinking about it now I realize that it wasn't that long ago. The boy in the story could be still living today. In the seventies, when it was written and when I read it he most certainly was. The students sitting in English class with me could have had relatives living in the south. The boy in the story is not far in age from my parents. My classmates' parents and grandparents might have lived that life. My own family was from New England so I felt no connection to the South, but that isn't very realistic. White racism dominates our country north, south, east and west. Being from New England doesn't distance my family from the acquisition and control over the wealth sharecroppers built, maintained and were denied.

The biting cruelty and evil of a society where a man could be taken from his family and forced to work hard labor with no pay for six years until he is disabled and sent to walk home in disgrace or die on the road for stealing a ham to feed his family is deeply disturbing to me today. When the sheriff turned around in the wagon and shot Sounder, the family's hunting dog, as he was taking the father and head of the household away in chains he surely knew what he was doing to that mother and her children. He was stripping them of their most important and legitimate means of earning a living. Let alone what he did to the boy's father, and to the dog. I can't even begin to speak about the pain of his mother's life.

When I read the reviews about this book online today they mostly put it in the past, as a historical novel about the old South. I don't see it as that far away anymore. Don't we have a growing prison population that is disproportionately African American? Haven't my own sons lost their biological families for mostly economic reasons? I have two adopted African American sons. Their biological grandparents and extended families may have lived that life. It's still with us today. Does anyone else feel this?

by Yoko Kawashawa Watkins. Yoko is 11 and living in northern Korea at the end of World War II. She is Japanese and her father works in Manchuria, just over the border in China. Yoko and her mother and sister are forced to flee their home when Korean forces begin to take control from the Japanese. They have many harrowing adventures and escape murder, rape and starvation on a daily basis for over a year. Finally Yoko and her sister make a new life for themselves at home in Japan and are joined by their older brother.

This story was exciting to read but full of pain and anguish. It wore on me because I read it all in one sitting during my son's nap time on Saturday afternoon. It is almost too horrible a story to believe, but it is true and Yoko is a real person.

I lived in the northern Chinese province of Heilongjiang for two years teaching English. There were quite a few Koreans living in China at the time and there was a visible legacy of Russian influence as well. We saw Russian architecture and bought Russian bread when we visited the big city of Harbin. Our school liaison was a Chinese-Korean man whose family had been living there since WW II. He enjoyed taking us to Korean restaurants. He was embarrassed to admit that many Chinese people thought Koreans were dirty and disgusting enough to eat dogs. One of the Americans I was teaching with could speak fluent Korean and he delighted in talking with her in his native language. I think he felt mistreated and disrespected many times. I witnessed the racism and animosity felt between ethnic Han Chinese, other Chinese minorities, Koreans and Japanese. The feelings toward the Japanese, who had occupied the area just forty years previously, were thinly veiled animosity and disdain. I knew people whose family members had been imprisoned, beaten, tortured, raped and murdered by the Japanese army. Many white Americans may not not aware of it, but these groups have a long and painful history of racism and abuse.

It is really interesting to me to read this story from the perspective of a Japanese girl who was living in Korea. Just before the story starts she is in a position of wealth and privilege, being a member of the occupying elite. The story tells what happens to the women in the families of the powerful men on the losing side of the war as they are fleeing refugees. I can't help but try to imagine what it would be like if America comes to that position and I am one of the women fleeing with my children, trying to stay alive after being so comfortable and privileged for so long.

Anyone else read this book? If you have connections to Korea, China or Japan it makes it really fascinating and I would love to chat with you about it. If you are reading it with your children or students I'd love to hear what they think.

More links:
Study guide
Sample student essay
Parents Choice award
Discussion Questions

I started reading for Mother Reader's 48 Hour book challenge on Friday at 11 am. I finished Sunday at 7:30 am, when my boys woke up. I didn't read straight through, of course. I just tried to carve out as much time as I could. I read four books in a total of 14 hours, covering 814 pages. I want to post about the books one at a time so I will put up individual posts for them today and tomorrow morning. They are:

1. The Ear, the Eye and the Arm by Nancy Farmer
2. The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter
3. So Far from the Bamboo Grove by Yoko Kawashima Watkins
4. Sounder by William H. Armstrong
   

by Conrad Richter. Ballantine Books, 1953. I think I read this in Jr. High but I didn't remember it at all. I have recently read criticism of the use of the term "squaw" and reference to scalping on the American Indians in Children's Literature Blog by Debbie Reese. Those terms are all through the book and now that I doubt their authenticity that bothered me a lot. The story is of a young man named True Son. He was taken captive by Delaware Indians when he was only four years old. He was adopted and became a beloved family member of his Native American family. When he is 14 a treaty is signed forcing his Indian father to send him back to his European American family. True Son is heart-broken. He hates life in the white settlement. He eventually makes his way back to his Indian home but the heartbreak doesn't end there.

This story moved me on a number of levels. The injustice of colonial take over of Indian land, the racism and violence inherent in the clash of cultures, and the issues of adoption and biological families competing for True Son's loyalty all touch me. I would love to be part of a discussion with young people reading this book for the first time, to hear their take on all these issues.

For Mother Reader's 48 Hour book challenge: I read this book on Saturday, covering all 120 pages in 3 and half hours. I read another book later in the day, which I will blog about next chance I get. My boys are stirring again so I will have to end this here and come back later.

by Nancy Farmer. Orchard Books, 1994. It's the year 2194 in Zimbabwe. The three children of General Matsika, one of the most powerful men in Africa, were kept safe and secure within a lavish mansion. They were pampered and served and tutored in every way. What they really wanted was an adventure in the outside world. It goes something like this: out of the goldfish bowl, into the stew pot. Out of the stew pot, into the frying pan. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Out of the fire, into....?

This was a very enjoyable read. Children 9 and up who like fantasy, adventure, and Utopian alternate worlds will love this. I found it interesting, exciting and satisfying. There are a couple of spots where it seemed a bit unbelievable but the story moved so fast that wasn't a big bother. I was really moved by the justice issues where wealth confronted poverty. It seemed a bit too close to our present day world in some respects. I like being challenged in that way and I think young adults will as well.

I read this as my first book in Mother Reader's 48 hour challenge. I had actually started it a few days before, so I am only counting 275 pages of the book's 311 pages in my tally. I started reading at 11 am on Friday morning and read a total of 5 hours on Friday. I can't really put everything aside and literally do nothing but read, of course, so I just did what I could. It puts me out of the running for any prizes, but I don't really care about that. I am just so thrilled and satisfied to be doing it at all. In the past five years, since I became the mother of three boys, I haven't read this much in one weekend. It is refreshing and I am really happy I did it!