Maya Soetoro-Ng, illustrated by Yuyi Morales,
Ladder to the Moon
Candlewick Press, 2011.

Ages 4 and up

“What was Grandma Annie like?” young Suhaila asks her mother about the grandmother she never met.  “Full, soft, and curious,” her mother replies.  “Your grandma would wrap her arms around the whole world if she could.”

For children who never had the opportunity to meet a cherished grandparent, the absence of that influential figure becomes a presence in their lives, intensifying the feelings their own parents have about their loss.  “Becoming a parent made me think of my own mother with both intense grief and profound gratitude,” writes Maya Soetoro-Ng in a note following the text of Ladder to the Moon. “I wished that my mother and my daughter could have known and loved each other. I hoped that I could teach Suhaila some of the many things I learned as I grew up witnessing my mother’s extraordinary compassion and empathy.”  In the case of Soetoro-Ng and her daughters, the grandmother in question has intrigued many people around the world as she is also the mother of U.S. President Barack Obama, Soetero-Ng’s older half-brother.

Since the beginning of the Obama campaign, journalists and politicians have wondered and written about this mysterious and unconventional woman, Stanley Ann Dunham, who died in 1995.  There is no question that she, a noted anthropologist and often single mother, had an enormous influence on the lives of her children and thus on history itself.  Her daughter’s dream story about the young Suhaila meeting her grandmother comes from a personal, family perspective that will resonate with any child in such a situation, as well as giving adult readers a new insight into this enigmatic figure.

Grandma Annie encourages Suhaila to use each of her five senses to reach out to the rest of the world. Together they find people in trouble: trembling in earthquakes, trying to outswim Tsunamis, and praying for peace.  Annie and Suhaila reach down from the moon to offer their solace and comfort as they bring these people up, making the moon brighter for all to see.

Yuyi Morales’ stunning illustrations bring diverse people together to share and connect on the moon.  In one scene, they tell stories around a campfire, each with a glowing circle of words around her head.  These lines, pulled from traditional narratives and the personal stories of Morales’ friends, represent six languages and four different alphabets.

Above all, Soetoro-Ng says of her mother, she was a storyteller.  Those stories have been the inspiration for much of the author’s own life; and with a story, she and Morales honor this posthumously famous woman in a deeply personal yet universal way.

Abigail Sawyer
December 2011

Summer holidays are almost here and I’m sure if you ask my children what their summer plans are, “reading” and “playing” will be near the top of their lists. So for us (and many others I’m sure!) the timing and theme of PaperTigers’ newest issue How Children Play Around the World is perfect. In this bimonthly update, a diverse line-up of authors and illustrators share their memories of playtimes past and artwork of children at play, speak of the ways in which their childhood games helped shape them, and more. One of the many highlights in the Personal Views section is PaperTigers’ Managing Editor and Producer Aline Pereira’s article Favorite Picture Books about Creative Play.

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.

At the moment Older Brother, Little Brother and I are in the middle of an intense week of rehearsals for the Ryedale Festival’s Community Opera (in North Yorkshire, UK) – this year’s production is a modernised version of the 15th Century English morality play Everyman by Em Whitfield Brookes and Tim Brookes. In a nutshell, it is about Death sent by God to summon Everyman, who is not at all ready, spiritually, to meet his Maker.

This therefore seemed to be the right time to read together Wolf Erlbruch’s extraordinary picture-book Duck, Death and the Tulip (Gecko Press, 2008) – and the book’s translator, Catherine Chidgey, deserves a special mention too! It might seem strange to describe a book about death as beautiful but then, as I have just said, this is an extraordinary book. As Death slips Duck’s lifeless body into “the great river” at the end, the reader is filled with a deep sense of peace, as well as a rueful recognition of the truth of Death’s final thought: “But that’s life” – and perhaps what this story gets across particularly poignantly, but totally matter-of-factly, is that where there is life, death is inevitable. Duck is definitely horrified (and frightened) to discover at the beginning that Death is stalking her. Who wouldn’t be? Then a surprising thing happens – Duck starts to make friends with Death. What follows includes some exquisite moments, such as where Death gets cold when Duck takes him off to the pond for a swim -

‘Are you cold?’ Duck asked. ‘Shall I warm you a little?’
Nobody had ever offered to do that for Death.

Duck’s musings offer much food for thought: all the time she is preparing herself for the fact that sometime soon, she’s not sure exactly when, she will die. Erlbruch’s writing is deft in expressing the tension between loving life and preparing to let go of it. His artwork is haunting too and Duck, Death and the Tulip is a worthy follow-up to Erlbruch’s 2006 Hans Christian Andersen Award for illustration.

A caveat, though: straightforward as it appears, Duck, Death and the Tulip raises complex ideas, which need to be given discussion space. This, however, may be as much to reassure adults that the book has indeed conveyed its life-affirming core, as to clarify any misunderstandings on the part of children. It would be a good choice of story to talk about the death from old age of a loved one – though not when grief is raw. Our context was Everyman. Erlbruch’s cultural heritage includes Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. What stories do you have in your culture which link Life and Death?

As I finish my preparations to return to Bangkok, I find myself thinking about this month’s Tiger’s Choice. The Happiness of Kati depicts a lifestyle that I have never seen in Thailand, and I find myself wondering if it is a realistic depiction.

Kati and her grandparents live as people in Thailand have for centuries–up until the present day. Their world is clean and quiet and filled with the blessings of nature. When Kati and her grandfather go out in their boat, they row through unpolluted waterways that Kati can dabble her toes in after she and her grandfather finish their picnic lunch. They live in a world untarnished by satellite dishes, cable TV, or mobile phones. There’s not a fast food venue or a 7/11 convenience store in sight. It is a world of the past that all Thai people yearn to return to, and it is portrayed in loving and idealized detail in Jane Vejjajiva’s novel.

And yet within this ideal world, harsh truths intrude and are handled fearlessly. Death, disease, desertion–these are examined carefully and unshrinkingly, through the eyes of a little girl and the family who loves her. It is the softened world that Kati lives in that makes it possible to look at grief and loss with a feeling of acceptance and hope. And it is the well-constructed characters who take life within a matter of sentences who take this book well beyond the realm of moral instruction into the enduring community of classic children’s literature.