This week-end marks one year on from the devastating  Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.  As the efforts continue to rebuild homes, schools – whole towns and their infrastructure, rebuilding lives without  loved ones, friends, colleagues will  take longer. The IBBY Children in Crisis Fund was one of the many organisations that responded to the crisis, delivering books and Bibliotherapy raining, and stories will continue to play their part in the healing process.

The impact of natural disasters can be hard to grasp for grown-ups let alone children, and reading sories together is one way of facilitating discussion.  Tsunami! by Kimiko Kajikawa and stunningly illustrated by Ed Young (Philomel Books, 2009) is a good story to read together to talk with young children about what happened in Japan.  It is based on the true story of Hamaguchi Goryou (1820-1885), as related by writer Lafcadio Hearn in “A Living God“, one of the stories in his book Gleanings in Buddha-Fields.

A wealthy landowner is so loved and respected by the people from the nearby village, that they call him Ojiisan, Grandfather.  One day, during the celebrations of the rice harvest, he is the only person who recognises that a tsunami is about to hit and realises that it is up to him to save everybody.  His grandson thinks he has gone mad when his grandfather sets the rice fields alight, but he has a special reason…

In this beautiful retelling by Kimiko Kajikawa, readers are very aware of the dangers involved but have the reassurance of a happy ending.   Ed Young’s powerful collages convey the power of nature and the many different emotions each stage of the story evokes.  And for older readers, Kimiko has excellent resouces and ideas on her website.

A fabulous selection of books heads the awards list for this year’s Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA) Awards, announced on Monday. The winners in the children’s/YA categories are:

The Great Wall of Lucy Wu by Wendy Wan-Long Shang (Scholastic, 2011)  – Children’s Literature Award;

Orchards by Holly Thompson (Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2011) – Young Adult Literature Award;

The House Baba Built: An Artist’s Childhood in China by Ed Young (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2011) -  Picture Book Award.

The Honor Books were:

Vanished by Sheela Chari (Hyperion, 2011) – Honor Book, Children’s Literature Category.

Level Up by Gene Luen Yang (First Second Books, 2011) – Honor Book in the Young Adult Literature category.

Hot Hot Roti for Dada-ji by F. Zia, illustrated by Ken Min (Lee & Low Books, 2011) – Honor Book in the Picture Book category.

And following on from Corinne’s post about some of this year’s ALA Awards, here are some more highlights:

Allen Say‘s Drawing from Memory (Scholastic, 2011) has won a 2012 Robert F. Sibbert Informational Book Honor Award. To see all this year’s winners go here. Read our Q&A with Andrea Pinkney, the book’s editor, here.

As well as being outright winner of the 2012 Pura Belpré Author Award, Under the Mesquite, by Guadalupe Garcia McCall (Lee and Low Books, 2011), was a finalist for the William C. Morris YA Debut Award, along with Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys (Philomel Books, 2011). Go here to find out more.

What a superb selection of books!  Many Congratulations to all the winners.

Happy New Year’s!  Today marks the beginning of the Year of the Dragon on the Chinese lunar calendar.  We celebrated with friends this weekend and had a wonderful dinner of roast duck, steamed pickerel, mushroom and seafood egg foo yung, sticky rice, and almond cookies and candied walnuts for dessert.  As this is the year of the dragon, I was reminded of a Books at Bedtime post I did on a wonderful children’s book by Ed Young, The Sons of the Dragon King.   Do check it out (of the library soon!)  PT’s picture gallery also features the work of Ed Young’s most recent book The House that Baba Built.  Hope you all have an auspicious Year of the Dragon!

Head on over to the PaperTigers website to enjoy a feast of artwork from gifted artist Ed Young, including images of the amazing fold-out collages in his recent book The House Baba Built. If you missed our interview with Ed in December, then do read that too – he gives some fascinating insight into how he works, as well as his views on the future of books.

Click on event name for more information

I Have a Dream | Writing for Social Change by Pooja Makhijani~ ongoing until Dec 2, Singapore

Salon du livre et de la presse jeunesse~ ongoing until Dec 6, Montreuil, France

The Children’s Bookshow: Stories From Around The World~ ongoing until Dec 7, United Kingdom

Guadalajara Book Fair~ ongoing until Dec 4, Guadalajara, Mexico

The Original Art: Celebrating the Fine Art of Children’s Book Illustration~ ongoing until Dec 29, New York, NY, USA

Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary: Children’s Books and Graphic Art~ ongoing until Dec 30, Chicago, IL, USA

2012 South Asia Book Award~ entries accepted until Dec 31

16th Annual Family Trees: A Celebration of Children’s Literature~ ongoing until Jan 1, 2012, Concord, MA, USA

21st Annual Children’s Illustration Show~ ongoing until Jan 1, 2012 Northampton, MA, USA

Budding Writers Project~ entries accepted until Jan 6, 2012, Singapore

Growing Every Which Way But Up: The Children’s Book Art of Jules Feiffer~ ongoing until Jan 22, 2012, Amherst, MA, USA

A Journey Without End: Ed Young~ ongoing until Jan 28, 2012, Abilene, TX, USA

The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats Exhibition~ ongoing until Jan 29, 2012, New York, NY, USA

Exhibits of Winning Entries from the 2011 Growing Up Asian in America Contest~ ongoing until Feb 2012, USA

 Book Week 2012 Writing Contest for Kids & Teens~ submissions accepted until Feb 1, 2012, Canada

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Primary Source’s Global Read: Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok. Live, online chat and Q/A session with the author~ Dec 1

A Game That Calls Up Love and Hatred Both: The Child, the First World War, and the Global South~ Dec 1 – 4, Sydney, Australia

Malaysia Art Book Fair~ Dec 1 – 15, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

SCBWI France International Conference for Writers and Illustrators~ Dec 2 – 3, Paris, France

An Artist Remembers: Hanukkah Lamps Selected by Maurice Sendak~ Dec 2 – Jan 29, 2012, New York, NY, USA

The Reading Child: Children Literature & Reading Conference~ Dec 3, Chennai, India

Theatre Production Inspired by Mahashweta Devi’s story Kyun-Kyun Ladki / Why-Why Girl Published by Tulika Books~ Dec 3, Mumbai, India

Singapore Children’s Book Club Presents: Grant S. Clark, Author of Monkey Magic Series~ Dec 3, Singapore

The Children’s Literature Centre at Frostburg State University Presents Storybook Holiday~ Dec 3, Frostburg, MD, USA

Read Out Loud! Family Literacy & Book Festival~ Dec 3, New York, NY, USA

The Exquisite Conversation: An Adventure in Creating Books~ Dec 3, Cambridge, MA, USA

Look! The Art of Australian Picture Books Today~ Dec 3 – Dec 31, 2012, Australia

Best Books: Children’s Reading Series – A Chanukah Noel~ Dec 4, Gatineau, QC, Canada

SCBWI Israel Event: Illustrator Frane Lessac Visits From Australia~ Dec 4, Jerusalem, Israel

The Fourteenth Biennial Symposium on Literature and Culture in the Asia-Pacific Region~ Dec 4 – 7, Perth, Australia

SWET and SCBWI Co-present~ J-Boys: From Inspiration to Translation. The Story of Middle Grade Novel J-Boys: Kazuo’s World, Tokyo, 1965~ Dec 6, Tokyo, Japan

Translating the Wonderful: Children’s Literature in Translation~ Dec 6, London, United Kingdom

Summertime Stories~ Dec 10, Blacktown, Australia

The Best of the Best in 2011 with Susan Bloom~ Dec 10, Amherst, MA, USA

Chapter & Verse’s (A Book Club for Adults Discussing Children’s Lit) Mock Newbery and Caldecott Discussions~ Dec 15, USA

International Conference on Languages, Literature and Linguistics~ Dec 28 – 30, Dubai, UAE

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Fremantle Children’s Literature Centre Exhibits and Programs~ Fremantle, Australia

Dromkeen National Centre for Picture Book Art Exhibits~ Riddells Creek, Australia

Books Illustrated Events and Exhibitions~ Middle Park, Australia

International Youth Library Exhibits~ Munich, Germany

Newcastle University Programme of Talks on Children’s Books for 2011-2012~ Newcastle, United Kingdom

Seven Stories (the National Home of Children’s Books in Britain) Events~ Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Discover Children’s Story Centre~ London, United Kingdom

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art~ Amherst, MA, USA

The National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature Exhibits~ Abilene, TX, USA

We are so excited to welcome renowned illustrator and author Ed Young to PaperTigers. There just aren’t enough superlatives to describe his work, and his versatility is perhaps summed up by the conversation I had with Younger Brother when he asked me why I was so excited the other day:

Me – I’m going to be speaking to Ed Young on the phone today.
Y.B. – Who?
Me – You know, Ed Young, who wrote the book you picked off my pile the other day – The House Baba Built?
Y.B. – Oh, yes, I liked that.
Me – Come on, let’s go and pull some of his books off your shelves… Here we are, Tiger of the Snows – Ed Young illustrated that.
Y.B. – Oh, I love that.
Me – And Wabi Sabi …
Y.B. – I really love Wabi Sabi [... digression into discussion of whether certain bits of our home aren't wabi sabi].
Me – and Yeh-Shen … and Lon Po Po … Beyond the Great Mountains … Sadako … Seven Fathers [etc. etc.]
Y.B – …[interspersing the above with comments of surprise and appreciation, culminating in "He did all these?!?" before settling down with a pile of all these favorite books.]

I think he can be forgiven for not realising they all came from the same artist’s hand…

So head on over to the PaperTigers site for our interview; I assure you, you’re in for a real treat. Among other things, Ed shares with us some of the challenges of creating his wonderful new picture-book The House Baba Built (Little Brown and Co., 2011); his passion for calligraphy; and how he sees the future as a world without books…

Ed Young, author-illustrator, text as told to Libby Koponen,
The House Baba Built: An Artist’s Childhood in China
Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

Age 4-8 and up

Born in 1931 the fourth of five siblings, Ed Young spent the years of the great depression, Japanese occupation, and World War II in a magnificent environment thanks to his father’s building skills and negotiating acumen. The esteemed Young, a senior talent in the world of children’s literature, celebrates his baba’s loving care and his extended family’s safe passage through terrible times in this collage-illustrated memoir.

In exchange for building the house on a Shanghai property he couldn’t afford to buy (a safe suburb of embassy housing), Baba secured use of the home for 20 years. He designed a substantial two-story edifice with many outdoor spaces and even a swimming pool. (Empty most of the time, the pool was used for riding bikes.) Young’s large-format book with several fold-out pages incorporates many old family photographs, sketches of siblings and relatives, and detailed diagrams of the house that Baba built. At the close of the story, double foldout pages display a layout sketch of both floors of the house, with tiny images of people pasted in the various rooms. Thirteen rooms are depicted, plus outdoor decks and a rooftop playground.

Koponen shapes Young’s words into a lyrical account of family life, repeating the phrase “the house that Baba built” to poetic effect. Text is interspersed scrapbook-style amongst cutouts of Young’s sketches–household members on a see-saw, roller-skating on the rooftop, dancing in the large ground floor living room. Baba, who had received a graduate degree from the University of Michigan in 1917, was cultured and somewhat westernized, but like everyone in Shanghai, the family suffered food shortages and overcrowded conditions for many years. Bombs fell nearby towards the end, but the house withstood the attacks, thanks to Baba’s sturdy construction.

Back matter includes the location of the house on a contemporary map of Shanghai, a family time line from 1915-1947, and an author’s note describing his 1990 visit to the house and how this book came into being. A fascinating window into Shanghai history, Young’s heartfelt tribute to his baba will endear children yet again to his stunning visual imagery and, this time, to his personal story as well.

Charlotte Richardson
November 2011

Since my last update on this year’s PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge, we have added some great books to our list.

Together, we have read two new autobiographical picture books: Allen Say’s Drawing from Memory (Scholastic, 2011) and Ed Young’s The House Baba Built (Little, Brown and Company, 2011) – both wonderful, and I’m not going to say much more about them here as we will be featuring both of them more fully on PaperTigers soon. Those are our reading-together non-fiction books for the Challenge.

As our local book, we tried reading a book of folk tales from the North York Moors, where we live in the UK, but discovered the stories formed part of a tourist guide, including instructions for getting around… we extracted what we could but it wasn’t a very satisfactory read. It has made us not take beautifully illustrated and retold folk tales for granted!

Older Brother has read Rainbow World: Poems from Many Cultures edited by Bashabi Fraser and Debjani Chatterjee , and illustrated by Kelly Waldek (Hodder Children’s Books, 2003).  He dipped in and out of it through the summer break and we had to renew it from the library several times…

Older Brother has also been totally captivated by A Thousand Cranes: Origami Projects for Peace and Happiness. After reading the story of Sadako for the Reading Challenge way back in its first year, he’s wanted to know how to make the cranes but I have two left hands when it comes to origami – or at least I thought I did, until I received a review copy of A Thousand Cranes from Stone Bridge Press.  Recently revised and expanded from the original book by renowned origami expert Florence Temko, it’s a super little book, with good clear instructions for beginners like us, and giving background about both the offering of a thousand origami cranes as a symbol of longevity, and specifically the story of Sadako and the Thousand Cranes.  Older Brother, now that he is older, (more…)

Retold by Ashley Ramsden, illustrated by Ed Young,
Seven Fathers
Roaring Brook Press, 2011.

Age 4-8+

The talented award-winning illustrator Ed Young collaborated with renowned storyteller Ashley Ramsden to bring to life the Norwegian folk tale on which Seven Fathers is based. Young’s cut-paper collages, dusted with splatters of snow white and other colors on kraft paper backgrounds, create a powerfully evocative mood for Ramsden’s account of a traveler seeking refuge in the deep Scandinavian winter.

The traveler sees a light and approaches a house glowing through the heavy snow. He finds on the front porch “an old man busily chopping wood.” Young shows us only large fur-gloved mitts holding a marbled blue ax over a patchwork stump. The traveler asks, as he will again six more times in this story, if there is a room where he could spend the night. And the old man replies, in words that will again be repeated, “I’m not the father of the house.” He sends the traveler to the kitchen to an even older man, who repeats that he is “not the father of the house” either, and who sends the traveler to yet another father, in yet another room.

At last the traveler is sent to a father who lives “on the horn in the hall.” The horn, a cutout of an aerial view of suburban tract homes, holds a “little speck of dust.” On the dust is a pillow; on the pillow are two black dots that turn out to be tiny eyes. Finally the traveler is told by a little man in “a voice as tiny as a titmouse,” that, yes, there is a room for him. Magic happens then; at once a feast appears, and the seven fathers “now the size and age of the traveler himself and each wearing a crown upon his head,” watch as he eats his fill, then lay their crowns at his feet.

Who are these fathers, and why does this tale make such deep, resonant sense? That will be a wonderful question for young readers–and for the adults who are privileged to share this story with them–to discover as they ponder the mysteries, patterns and rhythms of this beautifully-told tale and the strong, sensitive images that illustrate it. Seven Fathers is a work of art to be treasured far beyond the age range its surface simplicity may suggest.

Charlotte Richardson
September 2011

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…)