Jorge Argueta, illustrations by Fernando Vilela,
Arroz con Leche: Un poema para cocinar / Rice Pudding: A Cooking Poem
Groundwood Books, 2010.

Ages 4-7

Rice is an important staple all over the planet, but each cuisine that features rice often makes it seem as if the simple grain belongs to that tradition alone. The young boy at the center of Jorge Argueta’s latest bilingual cooking poem is aware of rice’s versatility, however, and he likes “all kinds of rice”:

I like white rice,
brown rice,
fried rice,
stewed rice,
watery rice,
chicken and rice,
beans and rice.
I guess I like rice with anything.

“But what I like best and love the most” he goes on to say “is rice pudding.” And, just as his counterpart in Argueta’s 2009 poem Sopa de Frijoles/Bean Soup did, this child wastes no time showing the reader how to make this simple yet special Latin dish.

Listing utensils and ingredients as he gathers them together in the playful illustrations by award-winning Brazilian illustrator Fernando Vilela, the boy gets to work while his mother, a silhouette in the background, watches from a distance.

Each step is more joyful and poetic than the last. Filling the pot with water “makes me feel like/ there is a creek flowing through the kitchen.” “The flames heating the pot/ are rainbow hands…hugging the pot.” Boiling water makes “maraca music,” and “Foamy waves and clouds turn the pot into sea and sky.” When he pours the milk, “there is a white waterfall in the kitchen” to which the child adds “salt stars and sugar snow.” The excitement of creating is equaled only by the anticipation of the delicious arroz con leche the boy looks forward to serving his family.

Like Bean Soup, Rice Pudding celebrates traditional foods—and the values they embody: family, warmth, sharing—along with a child’s growing independence. Vilela’s illustrations contrast the cool grey-green-blue of the creative kitchen with the warm comfort of gold and orange in the rest of the home. When the whole family joins hands around the table to “slurp up” this delicious treat, readers will wish they could actually be there. This sweet, joyful poem about a sweet, comforting food will surely inspire new cooks and perhaps some new poets as well.

Abigail Sawyer
April 2011

Kavita Singh Kale,
Avneet Aunty’s Mobile Phone
(English-Hindi version) Tulika Publishers, India, 2006.

Ages 3-8

“Miaow! I am Chikki” says the turquoise cat on the first page of Kavita Singh Kale’s Avneet Aunty’s Mobile Phone. Chikki’s pink tongue laps at a bowl of milk; a red hand tickles her tummy; her whiskers extend from two rosy round cheeks. On the following page, we meet Gagan, a boy dressed in red polka dots and lying on an orange bed, his turquoise hat the color of his cat. By the third page, when Gagan’s grandmother appears in burgundy and pink on a purple carpet, a stairway winding up the orange wall behind her, there is no doubt that we’re in India.

And we’re prepared, a little, for the mad arrival of Avneet aunty, her pink scarf and white braid flying behind her as she rushes past Gagan and Chikki, her mouth open, her teeth showing, her glasses askew almost down to her nose ring. We’re hardly surprised when her curly-toed shoe lands on poor Chikki’s tail.

Avneet aunty is a gregarious sort, a lady who is never without her mobile phone. Good luck on Gagan and Chikki getting to hear the story his grandmother had promised to tell them. Avneet aunty only stops talking when her phone rings, and then only to begin talking again. There’s a scary moment when Chikki sails over Avneet aunty in a game of tag with Gagan, and the phone goes sailing too. Crash! But all is well, of course, in the end, in this delightfully wacky picture book.

Animation film designer Kale’s exuberant illustrations will bring characters and setting vividly alive for young children, Indian or western. The spare text, 149 words in English, the equally terse Hindi below, adds to the exoticness of her remarkable little treasure.

Tulika Publishers, based in Chennai, India, specializes in bilingual books for children, with books in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, and Bangla. Avneet Aunty’s Mobile Phone is published in five bilingual editions (English with Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Bangla, and Hindi). It’s exciting to have a window into the multi-dimensional cultural world that Indian children experience through Tulika books. And who would have thought a western pre-schooler’s first bilingual English-Hindi book might be about a goofy lady’s cell phone?

Charlotte Richardson
March 2011

The Storylines Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-loved Book has been awarded for 2011 to Tangaroa’s Gift/Te Koha a Tangaroa, a bilingual picture book written and illustrated by Mere Whaanga and first published by Ashton Scholastic in 1990.

The Gaelyn Gordon Award is given annually for a children’s or young adult book which did not win a New Zealand award at the time of publication but has been in print for more than five years and has proved itself a favourite with New Zealand children.

“At first publication, Tangaroa’s Gift: Te Koha a Tangaroa was a finalist for the AIM Children’s Book Awards, the Esther Glen Award for writing and, unusually, also for the Russell Clark Award for illustration,” says Storylines Trust chair Dr Libby Limbrick. “It is wonderful that this fine and enduring book by an accomplished writer and illustrator… should now be honoured with this award.”

Of Ngati Rongomaiwahine and Ngati Kahungunu descent, Mere Whaanga is a writer, illustrator, historian and an academic. Raised on an isolated sheep station on the East Coast of New Zealand, she was inspired by her father’s respect for the land and his love of Mâori history and mythology. She completed her M Phil Maori Studies at Massey University in 2000 and says of her writing “I write from a Maori perspective, always with the intention that the work has integrity while being accessible to those who may know little about our culture and people.”

On April 2nd, Storylines will celebrate Mere Whaanga and all the 2011 Storylines Award Winners with its annual Storylines Margaret Mahy Day. The event will take place from 9am – 1pm at King’s School (258 Remuera Road, Remuera, Auckland). All are invited to attend the celebrations which will include this year’s Margaret Mahy Medal Award winner, Kate De Goldi delivering her lecture. To register, click here.

When PaperTigers’ book reviewer Abigail Sawyer mentioned to me that she is going to be hosting a Blog Carnival about bilingualism over at Speaking in Tongues, she got me thinking. Again. I first started mulling over bilingual children’s books here in relation to Tulika Books, a publisher in India that produces bilingual books in many different Indian languages alongside English, and to former IBBY Preisdent and founder of Groundwood Books Patsy Aldana’s comments in an interview with PaperTigers, and I will quote them again here:

I have always been opposed to the use of bilingual books, however given that Spanish-only books hardly sell at all, I have had to accept that books in Spanish can only reach Latinos if they are bilingual. This goes against everything I believe and know to be true about language instruction, the joy of reading in your mother tongue…

I was surprised by Aldana’s dislike of bilingual books because I love them and my children love them, and I have found that they can be a joy for inquisitive children seeking to learn independently – but I do realise that our contexts are different. Aldana’s dislike of them seems to stem from their being a substitute for monolingual Spanish books in an English-biased market, and she has found a pragmatic way of providing books in their mother-tongue to the Latino community in North America.

We love reading bilingual books because, although our main vehicle is the English, having another language running alongside, often enhances the reading experience for us, especially where the setting of the story is culturally appropriate to the language. This is true even when we can’t read the script, because even without being able to understand it, we can sometimes pull out certain consistencies. Seeing the writing always provides a glimpse of that different culture.

One of my favorite books of the last few year’s (more…)

This year the Hindu festival of Diwali is from Nov. 5-9.   Today marks its beginning.  I first heard about the festival from watching a National Film Board film called Lights for Gita in their Talespinners Collection (a series of short films for 5-9 year olds.)  In this story, eight year old Gita, who lives in Montreal is excited about celebrating Diwali in her new country, but something unexpected happens — an ice storm knocks out power in the city.  What will Gita do?  Will this holiday celebrated with lights now be ruined for  her?  Check out the DVD by ordering it, or finding it at your local library!  You can also check out the book on which the film is based written by Rachna Gilmore.  Rachna wrote three Gita titles and you can read an interview with her here.

PaperTigers with its focus on India this issue has a number of book suggestions about Diwali in a revisited Personal Views article by Chad Stephenson.  Pooja Makhijani also refers to Diwali in her Personal Views article entitled “A String of Bright Lights.”  She mentions her Diwali book picks in a post she did for the children’s lit blog Chicken Spaghetti awhile back.  In her post, she mentions how in northern India, Diwali is a celebration of the homecoming of Ram whose story can be found in her suggested picture book title Rama and the Demon King: An Ancient Tale from India by Jessica Souhami.  I found Souhami’s book at my local library; it was a bilingual one in Somali and English!   The story of Rama is found in the Hindu text The Ramayana which is a 24, 000 couplet poem written in Sanskrit by Valmiki around 300 B.C.   My daughter’s view of this ancient story of Rama was rather quaint; she said she liked stories where the good guy (Rama) and a bad guy (Ravanna) fight it out over a woman (Sita)  — although in this case, the bad guy is terrifying ten-headed demon!

Hope you have a happy Diwali this year!  Poetry Friday is hosted by JoAnn at Teaching Authors.

E-books and children’s book-based apps for mobile devices are no doubt popular these days and have been reaching many millions of children worldwide. While reading the reprint of a recent article on Pratham Books‘ website about the release of the iPad in India, I discovered that the following Pratham and Tulika books (since our current focus is India) are available as e-book apps:

By Pratham Books – free download:

-Annual Haircut Day (English) – A cumulative tale about a man with very long hair who can’t seem to find anyone to cut it.

-Chand Ka Tohfa – An attempt to creatively use technology to combine regional language exposure and entertainment.

By Tulika -

Ekki Dokki (English/Hindi)- A story based on an endearing Marathi folktale about two sisters—one who has only one strand of hair on her head, and one who has two—and what happens to them when they meet an old woman who lives alone in the middle of the forest.

The Runnaway Peppercorn (Tamil/English or Hindi/English) – Amminikutty Amma picks out the last peppercorn from her spice box to make some tasty onion chutney. But little Kurumolagu (the peppercorn) has no intention of being ground and eaten just yet. With a desperate Amminikutty Amma hot on his heels, he hops, jumps, skids, brakes, revs and races his way away.

In addition to making possible to switch between two languages on any page, these apps also allow voice-over recording, so that children can listen to the story, for instance, in grandma’s voice. If I ever needed to be convinced of the positive side of e-book apps, I’m now (more…)

My children have been asking lots of questions recently about their family history, which is in part closely connected with Uruguay and Argentina – this has led to reminiscences of a wonderful trip to the waterfalls at Iguazu and, naturally, led me to go and pull Francisco X. Alarcón’s book of Animal Poems of the Iguazú/ Animalario del Iguazú (Children’s Book Press, 2008) off the shelf. This is a vibrant book of poems, many of them quick, witty epigrams about individual rainforest species. Maya Christina Gonzalez‘ vibrant illustrations fairly zing off the page too! Here’s part of the English version of one of the longer poems, the last in the book, that brings all the animals together. It’s called “Same Green Fate”:

let’s listen to
the green voice
of the rainforest[...]

let’s learn
the distinct
living alphabets

of so many species
so many insects
and butterflies[...]

let’s make the world
a true Ybirá Retá -
a Land of the Trees

And that touch of Guaraní is echoed in the Spanish version too. Wonderful! If I close my eyes, I can relive one magical, wildlife-and-waterfall-filled early morning walk… Well, if you can’t actually be there, these poems are the next best thing!

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Anastasia Suen at Picture Book of the Day – head on over!