Age 8-12

A Stranger at Home, sequel to the authors’ award-winning 2010 Fatty Legs, is the story of Margaret Pokiak-Fenton’s return to her Inuit family in northwest Canada after two years in a Catholic boarding school, where she learned English, ate different foods, and became unrecognizable even to her own mother. A collaboration between Margaret and her daughter-in-law, Christy Jordan-Fenton, the book captures the process of re-entry faced by anyone returning from life-changing experiences in another culture. In this book, those challenges are framed in terms of losses to the Inuit community when young people are educated in faraway boarding schools.

Unlike aboriginal Australians, who underwent similar difficulties, Margaret was not forced to leave her home on Banks Island. In fact, her father, who also had a boarding school education, had voiced reservations about her desire to leave home and learn English. He understood better than his wife how hard the transition back home would be for their daughter. Time does its healing for Margaret; she is aided by observing the alienation of another outsider in the village and by her growing compassion for his situation. In the end, she bravely agrees to return to the school to accompany her younger sisters so that she can protect them and ease their adjustment to the wider world.

Liz Amini-Holms has done the story a great service with her evocative paintings of the Inuit people in their traditional clothing and native landscape. Her soft, dark palette and slightly blurry images give an exotic yet emotionally intimate feel to the scenes she illustrates. Margaret’s family photographs add further visual documentation in an appealing presentation. Each is referenced alongside the relevant text by a small icon and a page number that indicates the corresponding full-size image in the back matter. Also included are a map of the Northwest Territories and brief biographies of the authors and illustrator. Where the text uses Inuit words, a colored box at the bottom of the page defines the term.

Young readers will find Margaret’s story both historically informative and heartbreakingly poignant.

Charlotte Richardson
November 2011

A book for older readers which is multicultural in nature and deals with the theme of play is Chess Rumble by G. Neri, illustrated by Jesse Joshua Watson (Lee and Low, 2007). The main character, 11-year-old African-American Marcus, lives in a world of poverty and violence. Angered by his sister’s death and his father’s absence, and pushed to the brink by a bullying classmate, Marcus fights back with his fists. One punch away from being kicked out of school and his home, Marcus encounters CM, an unlikely chess master who challenges him to fight his battles on the chess board. Guarded and distrusting, Marcus must endure more hard lessons before he can accept CM’s help to regain control of his life.

Inspired by inner-city school chess enrichment programs, Chess Rumble, which is written in verse, explores the ways the strategic game of chess can empower young people with the skills they need to anticipate and calculate their moves through life. The book has received numerous awards and author G. Neri was recently announced as the 2010 winner of the Lee Bennett Hopkins/ International Reading Association Promising Poet Award. To learn more about Chess Rumble check out publisher Lee and Low’s Booktalk, Video Interview and Book Trailer.

By Rukhsana Khan:

When we first came to Canada from Pakistan in 1965, not only were we children bullied at school but my father, a tool and die maker, was bullied at work. Some of his fellow workers wouldn’t call him by name, they’d call him ‘black bastard’, and he put up with it because he had a wife and four children to feed. When we first arrived, he was making about $7 an hour. That doesn’t sound like much now but back then it was good money. However, within a year of buying our house in Dundas, Ontario, and my little sister and brother being born, he got laid off. He ended up accepting another job for $2.35 an hour. At the end of the month, after paying the bills, we had about five dollars a week with which to buy food; most of the time we ate dill weed and potatoes because it was cheap and filling.

We were the only Pakistani Muslim family in Dundas. The other kids in my class didn’t know much about brown people. When I was in elementary school the other children would tell me and my sisters that they were white because they were clean and we were brown because we were dirty. They said that if we went home and took a lot of baths we’d get white like them. So we tried it. We took five baths a day for about two weeks. When that didn’t work, we tried baby powder and finally, we stopped drinking chocolate milk for a while.

When I got to middle school things got so much worse. Suddenly it really mattered what clothes you wore, and back then it had to be jeans. I didn’t even ask my parents to buy them for me; I knew they couldn’t afford them. Instead I asked for some men’s polyester work pants I saw in the Sears catalogue. I figured they looked like jeans, they just didn’t cost that much. This attempt at trying to fit in was worse than if I hadn’t bothered but I didn’t know it at the time. Also, at school I often spoke out – a big mistake. I was always lucky to have some very supportive teachers, and stupidly I took to heart their encouragement to share my opinions and did so freely. I had very poor social skills. I read tons of books and in the books the kids who were outsiders and very different were eventually seen to possess extraordinary qualities and were valued – kind of like Cinderella. I don’t know what I was thinking, offering opinions and sticking my neck out when everyone else in the class tested the waters to make sure their words jived with the consensus before committing themselves to an opinion. That, coupled with the awkward way I dressed and my skin colour, really set me apart and made me a target for bullies.

Two of the most notorious of my bullies in grade seven and eight were the most popular boys in the school named John and Rick. John was very handsome. Rick was ugly but he had a very nice body so he was popular too. They formed the hub of the ‘in’ crowd. I desperately wanted to be friends with them. I thought I belonged with them. They were smart, witty and cool, and I thought they’d like me once they got to know me. There were other kids in the class I could have befriended but I thought they were losers and would only drag me down. There was one girl in particular, with very big breasts and bad acne. She was friendly enough, but I avoided her. John and Rick called her Betty Big Boobs when she wasn’t around. I never called her that: but I didn’t say anything to stop them either. I thought it was her problem and I had my own problems to deal with.

One day Betty didn’t come to school. I thought maybe she was sick but then the rumour went around that she’d tried to kill herself, and I felt horribly guilty for not having had the guts to stick up for her when they were calling her those names. I really thought I had the most miserable life in all the school; I never imagined someone else could have had it bad enough to consider suicide too. I vowed I’d make it up to Betty. I’d be really nice to her when she returned.

My teacher had to go to the office for something and as soon as he left, Rick got up and made an announcement. He sounded very official. He said, “Class, it’s come to our attention that our dear Betty has tried to end it all. We will now have a two-minute silence for our dear Betty.” And then John and Rick and all the bimbo girls around them started snickering and giggling through their own two-minute silence. I couldn’t believe it. Why didn’t someone say something? All the other losers just sat looking around at each other. Nobody said a word for that poor girl. I thought, “Why don’t I say something?” And then I thought, “I can’t! If I do, they’ll just jump on me. She’s not even here.” And I thought, “Just wait till Betty gets back. I’ll be her friend.”And I looked at John and Rick and I thought, “I don’t want to be your friend any more. I don’t even want you to like me, because if you like me, then maybe I’m like you in some way, and I don’t want to be like you.” I thought, “You go your way and I’ll go mine.”

Betty never did show up for school. And John and Rick and those bimbo girls ended up going to a different high school. It always bothered me that I hadn’t had the guts to say anything to them. And so I wrote my novel Dahling, If You Luv Me, Would You Please, Please Smile to kind of atone for that act of cowardice.

From the moment you look at the book cover and read the first page, you know you’re about to experience something special. The concept, a story about bullying that uses splotches of color and numbers to speak of the power of one person to initiate change, is highly original, and its execution, flawless. When One stands up to Red, who is bullying Blue, all the other colors who felt for Blue but had been afraid to speak up, follow his lead and turn into numbers who “count.” In the process, Red isn’t ostracized, but told by One that he, too, can count. “Everyone counts!” they all shout.

My seven year-old was clearly touched by the book’s message of inclusion. She said: “It was nice of them to say that. I bet nobody had ever been nice to Red before.” So young and so wise… I have a feeling we will be gifting this book to friends and telling one and all about it.

Read Kathryn Otoshi’s interview at Character Counts, where she talks about what inspired the book. And for more, check out Alison Morris’ post at the Shelftalker: A Children’s Bookseller’s Blog, written when the book came out, last year.

A book I have read again recently to my children is Milly Lee’s Nim and the War Effort, illustrated by Yangsook Choi (Sunburst/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). Set in San Francisco during the Second World War, it tells the story of Nim, a little girl who is intent on beating her arch enemy, Garland Stephenson, an unprincipled bully, from winning the school drive to collect old newspapers “for the war effort”. She strikes lucky when she is offered a garage piled high with bundles of newspapers and resourcefully calls the police to help her to get them to the school in time…

Nim’s rather strict upbringing is ostensibly unaffected by the fact that the Second World War is going on – but it pervades her life nevertheless. Her grandfather wears a lapel pin of crossed American and Chinese flags; and she is fully aware of what certain symbols around her mean – like a gold star on a white background in a front window, to show that “the family who lived there had lost someone in the war”. At the same time, their deeper significance is perhaps lost on her. She is too young to understand that the lapel pin is there to protect her family from the prejudice against Americans of Japanese ethnicity at that time; nor what the emotional impact of losing a loved one in a war overseas actually means. However, it is also these details that give the story a depth and a historical validity: and indeed, in an interview with PaperTigers, Milly Lee told us that, apart from slightly changing her rival’s name, this is a true story. Her grandfather received several phone-calls telling him that his grand-daughter was in the back of a police car, which must have caused more than a little concern, but for Milly:

Oh yes, the ride in the police paddy wagon was wonderful, exhilarating, jubilant, a thrill, and probably the best ride I’ve ever had – and I’ve been on many different kinds of rides since then: yak, elephant, dogsled, tundra-buggy, rafts, and camel!

I can just imagine! And I particularly like the ending, where Grandfather reminds Nim to “Be gracious in your moment of triumph” – and she places her last newspaper on Garland’s stack then “looked over her shoulder and flashed Grandfather an impish grin” – feisty!

This is a beautifully crafted story – and a beautifully illustrated one – which not only leaves young listeners cheering that Nim won the day but gives much pause for thought about racial prejudice and bullying.

We are running three in parallel in our household as my boys decided they wanted to complete it on their own, as well as do one as a bed-time readaloud… so here are our comments about Book Number One!

Back in October, I wrote a post about I Am Jack by Susanne Gervay - the time to read it came at the end of January when Older Brother had a few issues with bullying (now, I’m glad to say, resolved). As usual, I turned to stories as a springboard for discussion and we read it all together as our first Reading Challenge readaloud. Older Brother’s situation had been squashed very early on and certainly never got anywhere near what poor Jack has to endure but reading the book opened up comparisons and empathy. It brought home the importance of talking – and being available to listen. A couple of bedtimes were prolonged to read an extra chapter; and we had a very late night as we arrived at the end – we couldn’t possibly have left it hanging. Once again, I really recommend this book…

Meanwhile, Older Brother* (aged 9) chose Mga Kuwentong Bayan: Folk Stories from The Philippines edited by Alice Lucas and illustrated by Carl Angel. It is published by Many Cultures Publishing, a division of the nonprofit San Francisco Study Center. The book contains three stories: A Creation Story, The Monkey and the Turtle and Aponitolou and the Star Maiden. Here’s what Big Brother has to say about it:

I thought it was brilliant – especially the story where all the stars came onto the ground. It was about a star woman and a human man who fell in love with each other and the husband already had a wife on earth so he had to spend half a year in the sky and half a year down on the ground. I thought it was quite fun to have a different kind of book to read, with almost black and white pictures. I tried reading the Tagalog version but I didn’t get very far!

Little Brother (aged 6) had chosen The Birdman by Veronika Martenova Charles and illustrated by Annouchka Gravel Galouchko and Stéphan Daigle. It is the poignant true story of a Calcutta tailor who buys and sets free the sickly birds that are left at the end of a day’s trading at the market. You can read PaperTigers’ review of the book here, and here are Little Brother’s comments:

I really liked the pictures because they looked very artistic with lots of bright colours and dots on them. I really liked Noor Nobi’s idea of making a flock of poor birds. He set them free and they didn’t go far away because they loved him. I liked that it was a true story because something like that is very good and kind.

We will keep you posted on Number 2 of our Reading Challenge selections. In the meantime, do let us know how you’re getting on, if you’re already on board; or let us know your book choices, if you’re just starting.

* I have Here and There Japan to thank for helping me finally to come up with what to call my children in my blog postings: other possibilities had been commented upon and others were too much of a mouthful… I think this now works?!? So thank you, Annie!

“grow up with their respect of self and others intact, be fine participant citizens and, perhaps most importantly, become peacemakers in their hearts.”

This quotation comes from Peter Yarrow’s afterword of a remarkable picture book of Steve Seskin and Allen Shamblin’s deeply incisive but simple song Don’t Laugh at Me. The words of the song have become increasingly familiar since first being written just over ten years ago: but set here with Glin Dibley’s hauntingly expressive illustrations, and with certain words in the text highlighted in red, even young children will be able to respond to it, using their innate sense of justice to pull out the essence of the song’s message.

Be prepared for taking your time over it: each line triggers all sorts of questions and discussion. Reading this book to your own children or to a class of young children is a beautiful way to introduce them to the notion that “difference” should make no difference. They will appreciate the juxtapositions in the illustrations, like the one of the boy in a helmet in a wheelchair – in that order: the wheelchair is actually the last thing you notice.

There’s also a cd at the back and kids of all ages will enjoy listening to the song, performed so gently and meditatively by the song-writers themselves.

Peter Yarrow, quoted above, founded Operation Respect and a percentage of the sales of the book goes to their “Don’t Laugh at Me” project… And there’s also a Spanish edition. Reading Zone has just placed it in in its Top Ten Picture Books. So what are you waiting for?

Lots of my students haven’t read all summer long, and I am modeling what they need to do to rebuild their fluency and stamina: start with lots of quick, easy reads to build confidence and refresh skills.

My younger son can’t keep his nose out of a book (sometimes I even get exasperated): but my older boy, who is about to turn 9, is starting to need some chivvying and he hasn’t read as much this summer as I would have hoped. One way I’ve found to encourage him is to sit down and read the first chapter to him… except then we all get into it and it turns into a bedtime book!

I’m about to try out the technique with Susanne Gervay’s superb book I Am Jack. You can read the first chapter on Susanne’s website. She has also provided some good ideas and materials to download. Reading the book together at home and discussing it provide a valuable springboard for bringing up the subject of bullying. By writing the story, Susanne has put into practice one of the messages that underpins the book: the pen is mightier than the sword. It presents a well-rounded perspective from all angles, whether that of the victim, the bully, friends, onlookers, teachers, schools or parents… And it’s also a cracking good story that I think he’ll enjoy. Maybe we’ll read it together all the way through then he’ll feel inspired to pick up the sequel, SuperJack…