Take some time today and head on over to author Cynthia Leitich Smith’s blog Cynsations to read her Guest Post with author Holly Thompson entitled “Holly Thompson on the Perfect Setting & Orchards“.

Orchards is Thompson’s debut novel for young adults and is written in verse. It tells the story of Kana Goldberg, a half-Jewish, half-Japanese American teenager who, after a classmate’s unexpected death, is sent to her family’s farm in Japan to reflect on her participation in the events that led up to the classmate’s suicide.

Orchards has been receiving rave reviews since its release this past Spring (read PaperTigers’ review here) and is included on the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA)  Best Fiction for Young Adults Nominations list.

Holly has been keeping extremely busy this year (click here to visit her blog) and has just returned from the Manila International Literary Festival where she presented three panel discussions:

“Writing for Young Adults” with author Perpi Alipon-Tiongson and publisher RayVi Sunico;

“The Many Forms of the Novel”, in which she spoke about writing in verse and read an excerpt from Orchards; and

“The Stranger Experience” on writing away from home, cross-cultural experiences, and the multi-faceted immigration experience, with Gemma Nemenzo and Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz. The immigrant’s experience plays a vital role in Junot’s work and I have to share this amazing quote from him that I found on Tarie Sabido’s blog Asia in the Heart, World on the Mind:

“You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.” — Junot Diaz

Press Release:

April 28, 2010- Winners of the 2010 Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards were announced today by the Jane Addams Peace Association.

Nasreen’s Secret School:  A True Story from Afghanistan, written and illustrated by Jeanette Winter, Beach Lane Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, is the winner in the Books for Younger Children Category.

Marching for Freedom:  Walk Together, Children, and Don’t You Grow Weary by Elizabeth Partridge, Viking Children’s Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, is the winner in the Books for Older Children Category.

In Nasreen’s Secret School:  A True Story from Afghanistan Nasreen’s parents are (more…)

Two of the books I gave my 8-year-old daughter for Christmas were Douglas Wood‘s Old Turtle (illus. by Cheng Khee-Chee) and Old Turtle and the Broken Truth (illus. by Jon J Muth). I had heard much about these modern-day classics over the years and was looking forward to sharing them with her. I read the books once, before wrapping and putting them under our Christmas tree, but it wasn’t until we read them together, snuggled up in bed, that I realized how truly special they were. Their plea for unity, acceptance and understanding between people and nature got two thumbs up from my daughter.

In Old Turtle, when all creation starts arguing over who or what God is, Old Turtle, their wise and ancient leader, is the only one who accepts and incorporates the beliefs of all the creatures: “‘God is indeed deep,’ she says to the fish in the sea, ‘and much higher than high,’ she tells the mountains.” In Old Turtle and the Broken Truth (Muth’s image of the Truth falling from the sky and breaking in half being an especially poignant one), it’s up to a young, determined girl to help humans see that the truth they are fighting over is broken, and that there is not just one truth, but “truths all around us, and within us.”

The very important ideas these books convey add dimension to our website’s current focus on Respect for Religious Diversity, and the following quote from Old Turtle and the Broken Truth perfectly captures its essence:

Remember this, Little One… The Broken Truth, and life itself, will be mended only when one person meets another—someone from a different place or with a different face or different ways—and sees and hears herself. Only then will the people know that every person, every being, is important, and that the world was made for each of us.

Whitney Stewart (The 14th Dalai Lama: Spiritual Leader of Tibet; Becoming Buddha: The Story of Siddhartha) once wrote an article for the since discontinued literary journal Five Owls, called Understanding Cultures, Fostering Peace. The piece was essentially a profile of author Suzanne Fisher Staples (Shabanu; Haveli; Under the Persimmon Tree) and of her work, which often tells the tales of the Muslim people she got to know and admire while doing research on literacy for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

In her article, Stewart has much praise for Staples’ work and its power to promote peace and understanding. She talks about how her novels show us “that the worlds of Islam and Hinduism are as diverse as the worlds of Christianity and Judaism”; how she knows and respects the worlds she uncover; how “she finds her own humanness in the humanness of her characters.”

As it turns out, Stewart’s words say a lot about the humanity of both of them and confirm the idea that in order to encourage children to embrace, not fear, the diversity that makes up our world, we must help them understand the richness and interconnectedness of our peoples and cultures. “Until we stop judging people who are different from us as inferior,” cautions Staples, as quoted in the article, “our prospects for peace look very dim. What we need are empathy and compassion—not judgment and stereotyping.” Stewart concurs: “Children look to adults for confirmation of their reaction to differences. When children see someone ‘odd,’ they ask adults why it is so. If the adult confirms the strangeness, discrimination is born in the child. However, if the adult confirms the beauty of many ways of being, of living, then the child accepts the beauty and is perhaps drawn to that which once seemed different. In her novels, Staples confirms such beauty.”

Through their writing, both authors, in fact, convey a belief in young people’s ability to understand and embrace the complex beauty of our world. And perhaps because they appeal to children’s higher sentiments, their work always meets with a response.

I hope 2010 and years to come will bring us more children’s books by courageous and compassionate writers like them.

For more on Whitney Stewart’s work, check out this blog post, Inspiration for Books on Inspiration, where she talks about her desire to help children learn “to listen to their inner wisdom.”

Award-winning illustrator and author Mitsumasa Anno has long been engaging young readers through highly inventive books that call attention to the mathematical relationships that occur all around us. One such book is Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar*, a tale about “a porcelain jar with a sea inside,” which introduces children to the concept of counting by multiplication. Who ever heard of more beautiful imagery in connection with math? I certainly have not.

Anno is also highly regarded for his detailed illustrations depicting his interest in foreign cultures. In All in a Day, which Marjorie has highlighted last year on her “Night and Day” Books at Bedtime post, Anno and nine other artists celebrate “the commonality of humankind” through brief text and illustrations of a day in the lives of children in eight different countries: “We may live in different places, speak different languages, wear different clothes, and pursue different dreams, but we are all here on Earth–right now, each in our own country–and we all share the joys of laughter and learning and life.” What a great idea for young ones to contemplate and explore.

In an interview to the online magazine “Japanese Children’s Books,” Anno talks about his inspiration for All in a Day:

The inspiration for this book arose when I was overwhelmed by the finest sunset on earth at Uskudar, in Istanbul. It was such a fantastic and utterly gorgeous sunset to beat all sunsets! But when I realized that the sun which was just setting in front on my eyes was at the very same time, a rising sun in some other country, I was totally thunderstruck. This meant that this same sun was going down in a country at war and at that same time, it was rising in a country at peace. This was an unbelievably shocking realization for me.

Anno’s deeply felt realization is the kind we can all use more of, these days. Let’s all hope for its multiplication in our “mysterious world jar.”

*Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar and some of Anno’s other books have been included in Marjorie’s piece about alphabet and counting books, “A Whole World of ABCs and 123s."

How to Eat Fried Worms, by Thomas Rockwell, in print since 1973 and recently turned into a movie, is one of the 100 most challenged books in the United States, because it supposedly encourages “inappropriate behavior.” But how inappropriate really is eating fried worms? Well, that depends on your culinary preferences and where you are from. Whereas How to Eat Fried Worms shows how many expressions of disgust one can come up with when confronted with the idea or reality of eating slimy, crawly things, Men Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects, by the authors of Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, shows a wealth of primitive and contemporary insect-eating habits and recipes from thirteen different countries.

The fact that I recently found fried grasshoppers and Mexican maguey worms on the shelves of a food shop in San Francisco might be a sign that the western aversion to insects as food may be movig away from the usual ick! yuck! ugh!, though. But whether or not bug-eating becomes popular here and whether or not I’ll ever try insect cookery myself, I am getting the message: “respect the preferences of “others’ palates.”

Check out this list of insect snacks from around the world. And to teach young ones how ‘yum!’ and ‘yuck!’ sound in other languages, Linda Sue Park, Sue Rama and Julia Durango‘s Yum! Yuck! A Book of People Sounds is recommended.