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
By Daisy Alpert Florin I met Louise Erdrich in 1992 when I was a sophomore at Dartmouth College and she was a visiting fellow. That semester, I was a French teaching assistant, running “drill” sessions five mornings a week. Erdrich signed up for my section, and so I found myself in the unusual position of being language teacher to an award-winning writer. Erdrich was friendly and self-deprecating—but she was my worst student, her accent thick, her conjugations clumsy. Reading The Blue Jay‘s Dance, her luminous memoir of early motherhood, it is hard to imagine Erdrich tripped up by any language. Her prose is staggering, breathtaking in places. My copy of the book is covered with frantic underlining and enthusiastic asterisks marking places in which Erdrich captures both the frustrations and joys inherent in raising small children. “Growing, bearing, mothering or fathering, supporting, and at last letting go of an infant is a powerful and mundane creative act that rapturously sucks
By Hilary Levey Friedman Top 15 Birthday Books in honor of Brain, Child’s 15th! Books are the gifts that keep on giving, long past a singular birthday celebration. As we celebrate Brain, Child‘s 15th, this list suggests splendid books to gift to the parents—and the kids—in your life from that first birthday through the fifteenth. From perennial favorites to new classics, you’ll find something for your favorite Brain, Child reader (or future reader!) regardless of their sex or age. 1. Sheep in a Jeep by Nancy Shaw With fun word play, original illustrations, and an imaginative narrative the first book in Shaw’s popular “Sheep” series will quickly become a bedtime or naptime favorite. Because of the rhymes on each page, the book also lends itself to conversation and language development with your little one. After reading it several (or 100!) times, you can pause at the end of each line and let your growing toddler supply the word, allowing you to really
By Hilary Levey Friedman I’d never heard of Scott D. Sampson, but a few weeks ago he changed my parenting after I read his newly released book, How to Raise a Wild Child: The Art and Science of Falling in Love with Nature. How did this happen? He convinced me that I need to be a nature mentor to my kids. As it turns out, I actually have heard of Sampson before, because he is “Dr. Scott” on the PBS Kids show “Dinosaur Train.” As he writes in How to Raise a Wild Child, “For preschoolers, the marriage of dinosaurs and trains is like mixing chocolate and peanut butter—almost irresistible.” But this is not a book about a TV show. Not even close. The PBS show is only mentioned in the Preface and for about 10 pages in Chapter 9 when discussing balancing nature and technology. However the tagline Dr. Scott delivers at the end of each episode encapsulates the
An excerpt from Rare Bird by Anna Whiston-Donaldson I wonder how much to share. I want to be honest about what the first days of early grief are like, yet I don’t want to be cruel. That’s why I don’t think I can move forward in this story if I don’t first tell you what happens when I eventually see Mrs. Davidson in the grocery store. The grocery store is the absolute worst, most hellish place for me to be after Jack’s accident. Far worse than seeing the ridiculous, empty joke of a creek everyday or driving over the drain pipes or sitting on his bed surrounded by his things but with no Jack. Or even church, where my raw emotions are right on the surface, always, threatening to pour out when I’m just trying to make it through the hour and get back to my car. The grocery store trumps them all. When you spend years trying to get two
By Anna Whiston-Donaldson
By Hilary Levey Friedman Like Dara-Lynn Weiss before her, writing a negative piece about her child secured Liza Long a book deal. Her emotionally raw blog post, “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” (originally published anonymously on her blog The Anarchist Soccer Mom as “Thinking the Unthinkable”), penned in response to the Newtown shootings, quickly went viral after appearing on The Blue Review and then The Huffington Post. The reaction was extreme in both directions, with some applauding Long’s courage and identifying with her family’s struggle and others calling her an imposter and suggesting she is the one who needs mental health monitoring. Her just-published book, The Price of Silence: A Mom’s Perspective on Mental Illness, is an expansion of that polarizing post. According to the Introduction this is a book for two different audiences. The first is those families who have a child with a mental illness to let them know they aren’t alone by sharing her family’s experience. The
By Lori Rotskoff Why haven’t we done away with the mystique of the “perfect mother”? We know she’s a mirage. And yet, as editor Avital Norman Nathman writes in her introduction to The Good Mother Myth, the “fabled ideal” of maternal perfection retains its power to make us feel anxious, guilty, and even depressed. The myth of the “Good Mother” reigns on screen and in print, on blogs and on Facebook, flattening the complexity of real mothers’ lives and fostering a “manufactured culture of conflict and judgment,” of second-guessing and self-doubt. Here, Nathman gathers thirty-six personal essays that hone the raw material of maternal experience into pithy, pointed vignettes that make a strong impact on the reader. Sometimes confessional; sometimes questioning; and frequently defiant, subversive, and bold, they challenge our understanding of what it means to be a good mother beyond stereotype and social convention. Some writers plumb the depths of anxiety when a child faces medical problems or life-threatening
Orchards by Holly Thompson, illustrations by Grady McFerrin (Delacorte Press, 2011) One week after you stuffed a coil of rope into your backpack and walked uphill into Osgoods’ orchard where blooms were still closed fists my father looked up summer airfares to Tokyo why? I protested it wasn’t my fault I didn’t do anything! Exactly! my mother hissed and made the call to her older sister my aunt in Shzuoka Thompson’s novel in verse is a first person narrative told from the point of view of Kana Goldberg, a half-Japanese, half-Jewish American teen. After the suicide of a classmate, Kana’s parents decide to send their daughter away from her clique of friends to spend the summer living at her mother’s ancestral home in Japan. Kana spends hours working in her family’s mikan orange groves and has time to process the pain and guilt she feels as she gets to know her Japanese family and participates in their daily customs and
Rules by Cynthia Lord When Cynthia Lord’s daughter asked her why she never saw families like her own portrayed in books or on television, Lord went searching for books that included children with severe special needs. While she found some, most were very sad. “Sadness is part of living with someone with a severe disability, but it’s only one part. It can also be funny, inspiring, heartwarming, disappointing, frustrating – everything that it is to love anyone and to live in any family.” This first novel reflects all of these different facets of family life. Twelve-year-old Catherine has spent years trying to teach her autistic younger brother David “the rules,” including: Say “thank you” when someone gives you a present (even if you don’t like it). Not everything worth keeping has to be useful. No toys in the fish tank. If it’s too loud, cover your ears, or ask the other person to be quiet. Take your shoes off at
Sparrow Road by Sheila O’Connor (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011) Author Sheila O’Connor believes “everyone has a story to tell- and that stories help us see each other’s hearts.” When Raine arrives at the mysterious artist mansion on Sparrow Road where she and her mother are spending the summer, she has no idea why her mother has agreed to work there as a cook. “No music. No TV. No computer. No telephone. And everyday, silence until supper.” These are the rules presented to her by the brooding and iceburg-like owner, Viktor. While Raine initially would like nothing more than to get on the next train back home, she is soon preoccupied with questions about Viktor, the artists, the orphans that once lived in the attic, and why her mother suddenly took this job out in the country. Determined to unlock the many secrets, Raine’s search for answers becomes a story of self-discovery, a story of love, loyalty, forgiveness, and family.
Small as an Elephant by Jennifer Richard Jacobson (Candlewick Press, 2011) Elephants can sense danger. They’re able to detect an approaching tsunami or earthquake before it hits. Unfortunately, Jack did not have this talent. The day his life was turned completely upside down, he was caught unaware. Eleven-year-old Jack Martel crawls out of his tent after his first night camping in Arcadia National Park to discover that his mother’s tent and their rental car are missing. Once Jack faces the reality that he has been abandoned, he tries to figure out how to find his mother and avoid being taken by the Department of Social Services. As it turns out, Jack is not a typical boy, and he is used to his mother’s unpredictable behavior when she is “spinning” out of control. Jacobson begins each chapter with a fact or anecdote about elephants that runs parallel to Jack’s story. As the author learned in her research, elephants are maternal creatures.
