Elizabeth Quan,
Once Upon a Full Moon
Tundra Books, 2007.

Ages 5-10

The central theme to this, artist Elizabeth Quan’s first children’s book is a long journey: in fact, her own journey in the 1920s as a child travelling from Toronto across Canada and the Pacific to her grandmother’s house in China, via Japan and Hong Kong.

Quan describes vividly in both her prose and her illustrations the excitement of all the new sights, sounds and indeed smells encountered along the way, interspersed with all the different forms of transport they travelled by: train, ship, double-decker bus, cable car, rickshaw, ferry and then train again.  For the little girl, our narrator, and her five brothers and sisters, this is all new and they are journeying into the unknown; for their father it is the return home. This is one of the aspects of the book which make it special, as the majority of books dealing with the immigrant experience tend to focus on the outward journey. Here, Quan throws into relief one girl's question of whether she will fit into the country and culture of her parents.

For our narrator, the focus of journey’s end is her grandmother and, indeed, another theme of the book is the special bond between grandparents and their grandchildren, even when they have never met.  At the beginning, she draws a chalk picture of her grandmother holding out her arms ‘ready for a huge embrace’; at the end, the ‘grand old lady’ does indeed sweep them all up ‘in a tangle of arms, legs and bodies’. Throughout the book, Quan’s illustrations demonstrate that tangle of small people very effectively and any adult reading the book will empathise with what the logistics of such a journey must have involved!

The journey lasts a full lunar month and in that time, our narrator learns that home is wherever you are. She is reassured to see for herself at journey’s end that the same man in the moon is looking down on her, providing a fixed point in what she perceives to be ‘another world and time’.

Once Upon a Moon gives young readers plenty of scope for exploration of their own world, through comparison with their own travels and thinking about where journeys can take them. This touching story would be a good way to start a conversation or unit on immigration, and would make a very special gift from grandparents to their grandchildren.

 Marjorie Coughlan
January 2007