Ashley Wolff,
I Call My Grandma Nana
I Call My Grandpa Papa
Tricycle Press, 2009.

Ages 4 and up

The grandparent/grandchild relationship is universally special.  While grandparents play specific roles in many cultures and tradition often dictates certain rituals for the elder generation, this unique bond that skips across a generation is felt by grandparents and grandchildren everywhere.

Ashley Wolff, the versatile author and/or illustrator of more than 50 picture books including Stella and Roy Go Camping, Only the Cat Saw, and the well known Miss Bindergarten series (illustrator), celebrates this relationship with rhyme and warm, colorful collages in the books I Call My Grandma Nana and I Call My Grandpa Papa. 

A Chinese elementary school teacher, Miss Alexandra May, brings her grandmother and grandfather to meet her students on separate occasions and explains that she calls them “Nai nai” and “Ye ye” respectively.  The class has prepared for the event by drawing and writing about their own grandparents called Abuelo, Babu, Nonna, Yia-yia, and other titles--including Grandmasaurus and Grandpasaurus--by their beloved grandchildren.

A single poem is threaded throughout each book with each student taking a turn at telling how her Abuela is teaching her to sew a doll, how his Lola plays trains, how Dedushka does magic, how Ojii-San puts his grandson on his shoulders to watch a parade, and even how “Next-Door Nana” and “Papa-T” fill in as surrogates for children whose grandparents have died or live far away.

The book offers children a spot to place photographs of their own grandmothers and grandfathers with a space below to write about what they call them.  At the end Wolff lists more than 30 names for the respective grandparents from cultures and languages all over the world as well as a paragraph-length list of favorite ‘pet’ names for grandparents including my personal favorites Grammy (with which I christened my maternal grandmother) and Bapa (the title my niece has bestowed upon my father—“Bop” for short).

These inspired books are sure to please grandparents, grandchildren and the generation in between with their depictions of lively, joyful grandparents and grandchildren celebrating life and the fact that they get to share it with each other.

Abigail Sawyer
April 2011