Drawing from Memory by Allen Say is victorious in
SLJ's Battle of the Books. I was right again. For some reason, I am a bit nonplussed. I wish there was some way that
The Grand Plan to Fix Everything could get the recognition it deserves. Well-written FUN books lack respect in the world of books. And that is not right because the fun books, the so-called "light" or "fluffy" books, are what keep a LOT of kids reading.
Anyone who has ever watched and delighted in the coincidences of a Bollywood film (or "fillum") will understand what is happening in
The Grand Plan. The heroine MUST reunite with her jilted lover. The friends MUST stay tight. And the lovely postal worker on his honeymoon MUST find a job in this Eden like village. Barbara O'Connor, the judge in today's BoB match-up, mentioned these coincidences and I think she was not sure she liked them. I LOVED them. These coincidences lifted me from my rather coincidence free humdrum existence to a place where the sun shines and birds sing and the crowds break into dance with colored scarves and bells on their ankles.
HOWEVER,
Drawing from Memory is, as Barbara O'Connor so aptly puts it, an "experience". I had tears in my eyes as I closed this book about Allen Say's journey to become the great artist that he is. I felt enriched and enlightened after I read
Drawing from Memory and I feel it would best almost any other book on this list. But I am at a loss for words to describe it. It needs to be read and studied and felt.
Both books take American readers into other cultures and climates. Imagine! A twelve-year-old is given his own apartment so he can go to school!!!! Monkeys take over a bakery!!! Reading is the cheapest way to travel.
Tomorrow's match is between Kadir Nelson's
Heart and Soul and
Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai. My vote goes to
Inside Out and Back Again.
Let's see if I am right.
Since my last update on this year’s PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge, we have added some great books to our list.
Together, we have read two new autobiographical picture books: Allen Say’s Drawing from Memory (Scholastic, 2011) and Ed Young’s The House Baba Built (Little, Brown and Company, 2011) – both wonderful, and I’m not going to say much more about them here as we will be featuring both of them more fully on PaperTigers soon. Those are our reading-together non-fiction books for the Challenge.
As our local book, we tried reading a book of folk tales from the North York Moors, where we live in the UK, but discovered the stories formed part of a tourist guide, including instructions for getting around… we extracted what we could but it wasn’t a very satisfactory read. It has made us not take beautifully illustrated and retold folk tales for granted!
Older Brother has read Rainbow World: Poems from Many Cultures edited by Bashabi Fraser and Debjani Chatterjee , and illustrated by Kelly Waldek (Hodder Children’s Books, 2003). He dipped in and out of it through the summer break and we had to renew it from the library several times…
Older Brother has also been totally captivated by A Thousand Cranes: Origami Projects for Peace and Happiness. After reading the story of Sadako for the Reading Challenge way back in its first year, he’s wanted to know how to make the cranes but I have two left hands when it comes to origami – or at least I thought I did, until I received a review copy of A Thousand Cranes from Stone Bridge Press. Recently revised and expanded from the original book by renowned origami expert Florence Temko, it’s a super little book, with good clear instructions for beginners like us, and giving background about both the offering of a thousand origami cranes as a symbol of longevity, and specifically the story of Sadako and the Thousand Cranes. Older Brother, now that he is older, enjoyed reading this factual account here, and learning more about the Peace Park in Hiroshima. He is now determined to make a string of 1,000 cranes himself and send them to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial: full details of how to do this are included in the book. There are also lots of ideas for other craft projects, though I’m not sure any of us is quite up to making anything like the amazing example shown of pictures made with 1,001 cranes as wedding gifts. But with such clear instructions, the only difficulty now is choosing which of the 48 pieces of beautiful Japanese chiyogami
