Sharon who is going into 4th grade and Mary who is going into 1st aren't too keen on the idea of sending their two year old brother Di Di (David) to China for a whole year to stay with their grandparents. There are many relatives to share taking care of him there, but a year seems like a long time--it's ALL of fourth grade! Sharon is embarassed by Di Di's absence and she hides it from her school friends. When it comes up she feels weird about it. Both girls miss their little brother...maybe they might think of him a little less as the year progresses, but they look forward to his return. When Nai Nai (Grandma) brings him back the folowing summer...a whole new set of issues arise. This slim volume, just perfect for the newly-comfortable-with-chapters set, is Cheng doing what she does best: presenting immigrant (or immigrant-descended) families in slice-of-life stories that illumnate our differences while shining a light on our similarities. Her characters are nice without seeming overly good & the events of day to day life that fit together to tell the tale could all be happening to your neighbors. A good book for classrooms studying China (there is a short glossary of Chinese words at the back) or family relationships or those differences and similarities. |
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If you have read any of my previous posts, you know I sometimes feel like there are a lot of people living in my noggin. That’s great when characters are forming for something I am writing, not so great when making a decision (even one as simple as where to have dinner or which tie to wear). It can also be a help at other times when writing. One of my professors said you wear a writer’s hat when writing and an editor’s hat when editing. With all these people in here, there are plenty of heads to fill those hats. Wearing the editor’s hat can be difficult when I am too close to what I have written. If I just wrote it yesterday, getting that writer’s hat off my head is going to be more difficult. Lately, I have been enjoying pulling old manuscripts out of the drawer and editing them. It’s kind of like collaborating with myself to edit a manuscript I wrote two, five, ten years ago. And putting on the editor’s hat is easier because those phrases and words aren’t quite as “deathless” (like they ever really are!) to me. I can cut and change and move around what's on the page without feeling so attached to it. Often even when when I am writing for the first time, I feel like I am collaborating with myself. I am thinking and writing the story, but my misbehaving mind is suggesting other ways for it to go and the characters sometimes take over…and sometimes on the edge of sleep my subconscious supplies other suggestions. Those all go into creating. Then comes the editing which is sometimes a group effort too.
The images at the tops of each of the different pages of my website are actually pictures of my bookshelves not some stock images I found online. I own all those books…we have a couple thousand books in the house…we are both readers and have been for years. Some of those books have followed me through three states and nine moves—now that’s love, me loving those books enough to cart them around so much and so often. When I was setting up the website, I looked at a lot of themes, and I liked a couple that had image-headers. I thought about just having nature pictures up there…but the blog…my life, it’s about books. So I went around taking close ups of my shelves and picked the pictures I liked most. Believe me, there are many shelves not pictured on the site, and all are covered with the books from my “favorites” lists and Banjo’s recommendations and my recommendations. And as to the flowers that accompany my blog entries about writing. They all came from our yard over the years. Why put a flower there? I have NO idea. When I put the first entry into the blog that’s what happened & I decided to go with it. I have a nearly endless supply of flower pictures (not that we are expert gardeners, we just like flowers and try for a crop of some kind each year; some years we have more success than others—this year we are trying sunflowers. (Suffer, Sandy! Dw-ha-ha! --> my friend Sandy thinks moving flowers are creepy, and sunflowers follow the sun with their “heads”). The Squirrels seem to be dead set on not letting the sunflowers survive, so we may be flower free...except for the mutant rose. Can you name the books or authors from the banners? Even the ones with partial titles in the images? Have you read them? (You should :-)
These days I don’t get to pick what I read very often. I am a regular book reviewer for a magazine and website called Kirkus Reviews (www.kirkusreviews.com). My editor there sends be several books a month. Sure some of them are picture books, but most are chapter books and young adult novels. I am so busy reading those books that I rarely get to read what I call a “big boy book”; that just means a book written for adults. I also rarely get to pick a novel written for kids that I want to read…unless I read two books at once and that can get confusing or listen to a book on CD. That editor keeps me so busy these days that I have stopped reviewing for the other magazines I have written for in the past like VOYA, School Library Journal, Hornbook and Publishers Weekly. Of course you never know which Kirkus reviews I have written because reviews there are anonymous…dwa-ha-ha! The best part about reviewing for all those magazines (past and present) is that I am always discovering new authors that I might not have discovered otherwise. Through reviews at the various magazines I have written for I found Dan Wells, author of the John Wayne Cleaver and Partials books, and Michelle Gagnon and even David Levithan. If you’ve read any of the previous blog entries you know how I feel about their work. The other best part is the free advance copies. I often get to read really good books first (well, maybe not FIRST), and then I get to share them with family or as prizes at work (the Library). Yeah! Of course reading this way also means that I encounter authors and books on the opposite end of the spectrum…really stinky books. Books that needed more work before they were published or even books that never should have seen the light of day. And I have to read the whole book…On occasion this is torture. The same was true when I was on Newbery; if another committee member nominated a book, I had to finish reading it…so sometimes books sail across the room at our house. I have a few stories about books that bad (I will tell you if we meet in person)…I have a shelf of books at my house called “crimes against literature” where some of those books live. You can sometimes tell which ones got thrown across the room by their torn covers. One weighty tome of bad poetry flew across the room and ended up with a broken spine (it deserved it)…I don’t advocate book abuse, though! You might guess some of them from my goodreads pages…but certainly not all of those low star-ratings are books I reviewed or books that were bad enough to sail through the air; some are just books I didn’t enjoy that I encountered on my own. I actually better get reading…there are ten books stacked by the bed right now! Hopefully they are all good (I know several are because I trust their authors already). Maybe they’ll appear in a future blog here! Ya never know.
There are several books for kids who have to get glasses (another really good one is Lane Smith's Glasses, Who Needs 'Em), but I think this classic (which I bet not a lot have seen or heard of) makes the need to wear glasses less scary and more funny. It's also recommendable and readable to kids who DON'T need glasses...everyone can enjoy this not just the ones who need it as bibliotherapy. Iris Fogel didn't always wear glasses...until a fire breathing dragon came to her door. It turned out to only be Great-aunt Fanny. Iris sees scary or funny thing on one page...and when you turn the page the same shape is given color and turns out to be something entirely different. Here's an example: She THINKS there's a chestnut mare in the living room...but its just her babysitter. Things get worse and worse until her mother takes her to an optician and they pick out glasses...somewhat reluctantly on Iris's part. When her glasses arrive and no one notices, she's content to wear them (though she still peeks at what the world looks like all fuzzy and weird).
As a reader who had to get specs at the ripe old age of eight, I totally identify with Iris, and I still like to take off my glasses to see what the world looks like without them. My favorite thing to look at is Christmas lights; they are huge balls of bright color that pulse and move (as my eyes try to focus)...kinda neat and something non-glasses wearers can never experience. Ha! There’s a lot going on upstairs (in my noggin). Sometimes tasks or ideas (and don’t ever ask me for names…my brain refuses to hang on to names) get lost in the jumble. People tell me I am organized; when they do, I am always surprised. I like putting things in order (that’s the Librarian in me) but sometimes I forget where I put those orderly piles. It’s not as if I have a bad memory. I can recite the books of some series in order. I can talk about characters in Doctor Who or Deep Space Nine for hours. I can remember strange things like what friends were wearing the first time I met them (not everyone, but some) and hair—if I look at you funny after not seeing you for a while, it may be because you changed your hair style. This can be a problem as a writer. I may be able to remember lists of characters and occurrences in other writers’ work, but I have to keep notes on mine sometimes. In the planning stages, a journal comes in handy here. I can jot down ideas and tag the page with a colored post-it. But once the writing begins, whether I have an outline or not (usually not), I have to keep a few sheets of notes to remind me where I am and who is who. I wish I didn’t…maybe if I had the luxury to write daily for six to eight hours like I dream of (the reason I play the lottery…the one in a million chance to have the resources to write full time is better than no chance at all) I could remember all I need to remember…probably not, I know my brain. |
About MeTim is a writer, book reviewer and Librarian. He has a Master's of Library Science and was on the Newbery Committee twice. Technology scares and often annoys him, but he is always game for a silly costume! Archives
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