Helen Recorvits, illustrated by Gabi Swiatkowska,
Yoon and the Jade Bracelet
Frances Foster Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Ages 5-8

In this their third collaboration, the award-winning team of Helen Recorvits and Gabi Swiatkowska revisit Yoon, their young Korean immigrant heroine. Yoon and the Jade Bracelet chronicles Yoon’s first birthday in the west. She’d have liked a jump rope but instead she receives a book and a bracelet that teach her an important lesson.

Her book is about a girl tricked by a tiger. “I knew the story, and I laughed at the silly girl,” Yoon tells us, “but my heart still longed for a jump rope.” Her bracelet is jade, handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. Yoon’s name is etched inside, in “the dancing symbols that meant Shining Wisdom” in Korean. Jade is the symbol of truth and friendship, her mother explains.

At school, a devious older girl cajoles Yoon into turning a jump rope for her and then bribes her (you can practice jumping tomorrow) to lend the jade bracelet overnight. Yoon knows better but can’t resist the promise of friendship. Back home, she can only tell her distressed mother that she left the bracelet at school. The next day the girl denies “with her trickster tongue” that the bracelet is Yoon’s. But Yoon’s teacher realizes that Yoon’s whispered description of the dancing letters inside the bracelet is true; her eyes say “Older-girl-you-are-in-trouble.” Yoon, whose shame about losing her bracelet had led her to think she should have been named Shining Fool, can now wear the bracelet home and tell her mother “a story about a wise girl who tricked a tiger.”

Swiatkowska’s illustrations wonderfully render the emotional mood of the story and nuances in the characters’ facial expressions. When the girls tell their respective versions of the bracelet story to Yoon’s teacher, for example, they are pictured on each side of a headless figure whose vivid red print dress fills up the center of the page.

Yoon and the Jade Bracelet is both a sophisticated moral fable and a realistic portrait of an immigrant child’s initiation into the complexities of western schoolyard politics. In this appealing story, as Yoon learns about false friends and the true meaning of her Korean name, young readers will learn not only about jade but about dealing with the jaded as well.

Charlotte Richardson
April 2009