Multicultural Books for Toddlers, Children and Teens
Reviews by Susan Weintraub
The selection of books below are in addition to the books recommended in our Winter 2013 print edition. The books portray a variety of families and family relationships- stepfamilies, biracial families, single-parent families, same sex families, inter-generational families, families living miles apart out of financial necessity, as well as parents and children who live together but struggle to cross emotional barriers created by family secrets, mental illness, and autism. These poems, picture books and novels are set in different places across the globe – Japan, China, India, and the United States- but they share universal feelings of love, anger, success, disappointment, laughter and heartbreak.
You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you. - Frederick Buechner
Holly Rizzuto Palker Interviews Jessica Strawser on her debut novel, Almost Missed You. ALMOST MISSED YOU by Jessica Strawser, is an intriguing novel involving a husband and two-year-old son disappearing while on a family vacation. I’m not sure how Jessica created this deliciously suspenseful book with so much else on her plate (she is the Editorial Director of Writer’s Digest magazine, and she and her very supportive husband are the parents of two children under age five). As a mother to three young children myself, I couldn’t help but catch up with Jessica to ask her some questions about her novel, her family, and her writing journey. 1. One of the most horrific experiences I can imagine would be for one of my children to go missing. What specific parenting moment sparked the idea for your premise? Fortunately, there was no parenting moment that sparked the idea for my premise, but rather it grew out of a fascination with the
By Katherine Ozment Author’s Note: Several years ago, my son asked me what religion we were and I blurted out, “We’re nothing.” I’d long ago left the Christianity I’d grown up in and my husband had left his Jewish faith. We weren’t religious anymore, but what were we? I knew instantly that I needed a better answer for my son, his two sisters, my husband, and myself. So I began to explore how we could create a sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging outside the traditional framework of organized religion, a journey that resulted in my first book, Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age. For three years I traveled the country to bring back stories of secular pioneers who were creating new communities, forming meaningful rituals, and voicing clear answers their kids’ big questions. From hundreds of interviews and many hours of travels, I started to stitch together a new way to live
By Robin Whitten and Sharon Grover Whether you are taking a 5-hour road trip this weekend to see fireworks or driving a few miles to partake in a neighborhood BBQ, why not entertain the family with an audiobook? As the editor of AudioFile magazine, I’m excited to share our picks for middle-grade kids below—there are madcap adventures, familiar classics, and challenges facing friends and family. We can pretty much guarantee that the adult listeners will have just as much fun as the kids. Coraline Written and narrated by Neil Gaiman Harper Audio, 2002 A lonely, doleful girl discovers an alternative world in the apartment next door, complete with “other,” button-eyed parents who promise love and attention, not to mention better food than the girl’s preoccupied parents provide. When the malevolent “other” parents reveal themselves as evil, our unhappy heroine must sort things back to their rightful places. An intensely creepy story with eerie musical interludes by the Gothic Archies, makes
Reviewed by Hilary Levey Friedman When I think about my childhood home I think about Buddy’s pizza, Leo’s Coney Island Greek salad, and Lelli’s zip sauce. In other words, I conjure up memories of food—tastes, settings, celebrations. According to Bee Wilson, food critic and historian and author of the recent book First Bite: How We Learn to Eat, this is not at all surprising. Wilson writes, “Memory is the single most powerful driving force in how we learn to eat; it shapes all of our yearnings.” I can confirm that when I was pregnant I indeed had yearnings for comfort food. After my boys arrived though thoughts changed to do things: how best to feed them and how best to lose my “baby weight.” In reading First Bite, I have come to see these desires as interrelated, and almost certainly in ways I still do not fully understand, but which will surely influence my children’s eating habits, and thus those
By Christina Krost As I sit at my computer typing, I hear Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, the Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood reboot on PBS, singing from the next room: “When a baby makes things different, find a way to make things fun.” It’s good advice even for me, an experienced mom of three who stopped having time to read parenting books before baby #3 came along. My youngest daughter, Harper, is obsessed with all things Daniel Tiger and baby dolls, so this episode is pretty much on repeat all the live long day. She is my final baby, so she will never know what it’s like to transition from baby to big sister. But after preparing my two older daughters for this life change in the past I know that each girl reacted to the news differently: one with indifference, the other with absolute joy. As the wife of a mainline Christian pastor, I’ve observed many family configurations over the years and
By Lori Day As the author of a book about mother-daughter book clubs, and as a parent who often read books with my daughter at home, I cannot speak highly enough about the transformative power of literature. My favorite part of sharing books with my daughter is having a discussion that begins with some aspect of the plot or the characters, and then watching it shift seamlessly to a discussion about something similar that is going on in her own life. Whether during our book club meetings or in private historically these were conversations that might otherwise have never arisen. In those magical moments, the awkwardness and resistance that often prevent kids from talking directly to their parents about things that really matter just melted away thanks to the distance a “fictional” story presented. Sharing books with my child helped me understand her world and opened up crucial lines of communication when she was in elementary school—lines that remained open throughout
By Hilary Levey Friedman It has been said that the Bard’s words can be applied to any human situation. James Andrews, a British humorist, puts that to the test in Shakespeare’s Guide to Parenting, just released in the United States. In a month full of planning and parties, this short book (155 pages) is a great way to wind down, reflect, and chuckle as you head into a new year. William Shakespeare had three children—first a girl and then twins, a boy and a girl. While he must have been familiar with the demands of children (including but not limited to dirty diapers, sleepless nights, teenage insolence, etc.) none of his works are devoted to the topic. Enter Andrews who organizes quotations from Shakespeare’s oeuvre into timeless and timely comments on parenting. The book is divided into five acts that are roughly chronological. Act I focuses on newborns, so the issues here are evergreen. There is crying, breastfeeding, and calming.
I worry that my son might not understand what I’ve tried to be. And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything—everything I did, everything you saw—because there’s nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you will do this for me. —Kurtz to Willard, Apocalypse Now, 1979 I recently asked my kids about their first memories. “What was it?” I asked. “What’s the first thing you can remember?” Without thinking, both recalled early images of bold blue macaroni and cheese boxes. They had consumed Kraft by the case at daycare. “You don’t remember anything before eating macaroni and cheese?” I pressed. I was fishing for proof my parenting fuck-ups weren’t set in stone, floating around in their psyches like a laminated list already prepared for their future therapists. “Nope,” Andrew, my youngest, assured me. “I just remember playing
By Hilary Levey Friedman Vanessa Lapointe, a psychologist and author of the forthcoming Discipline without Damage: How to Get Your Kids to Behave Without Messing Them Up [LifeTree Media], writes, “Of all the workshop requests I receive, discipline is by far the most popular topic. Big people everywhere want to know how to discipline. By ‘big people’ I mean parents, grandparents, teachers, neighbors, aunties, uncles, caregivers, and any other adult who plays a significant role in the nurturing and growing up of a child.” Various philosophies, versions, names, and age-targeted suggestions abound when it comes to discipline, especially for toddlers and teens. But one thing pretty much every book about discipline agrees upon is that discipline is not about punishment and is instead about teaching. Most also agree that a style of parenting that experts call “authoritative parenting” appears to work best for many families. The fourth book on this list, 8 Keys to Old-School Parenting, defines authoritative parents as
By Hilary Levey Friedman One of the best pieces of advice I received while pregnant for the first time was to not focus on books about being pregnant, but to use the time to learn about the after part since while it may have felt hard to believe at times, you aren’t pregnant forever. And not just the first few weeks with a newborn, but the first few months because you might not have time to read (let alone process) any suggestions that books might offer in that postpartum period. By the time my own baby shower rolled around I read 6-8 weeks ahead in my infant books, and was glad I did. But even now I wish I had known more about introducing solids, or learned more about the different types of gear I would need just a few months down the road. This list is motivated in part by that spirit and also by the knowledge that while
