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.

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

* * * * *

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

*****

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

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…

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

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, enjoyed reading this factual account here, and learning more about the Peace Park in Hiroshima.  He is now determined to make a string of 1,000 cranes himself and send them to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial: full details of how to do this are included in the book.  There are also lots of ideas for other craft projects, though I’m not sure any of us is quite up to making anything like the amazing example shown of pictures made with 1,001 cranes as wedding gifts.  But with such clear instructions, the only difficulty now is choosing which of the 48 pieces of beautiful Japanese chiyogami paper included to make the next crane with…  And we’re thinking of taking up the book’s suggestion of encouraging our local community to create a string of 1,000 cranes together.

Over the last few months, Little Brother has probably read more than all of us put together, but for the purposes of the Reading Challenge, he has read the Spirit of PaperTigers book set as one item on his Challenge list.  He loved Biblioburro, and then finding out more about the library via internet videos etc;  A Child’s Garden has touched him profoundly; and he has read and reread as many of James Rumford’s books as he can lay his hands on, thanks to Rain School.

He has also read Manolito Four-Eyes by Elvira Lindo, illustrated by Emilio Urberuaga and translated by Joanne Moriarty (Marshall Cavendish, 2008).  Here’s what he say about it:

Manolito Four-Eyes is ten years old and he lives in Carabanchel, Madrid, Spain. He says that he wouldn’t manage to write about the first ten years of his life in the next ninety! He’s always falling out with his best friend Big Ears López. Manolito says he can sometimes be a dog or a traitor and sometimes a dog-traitor. He eventually makes friend with Ozzy the school bully.

My favorite bit was in the chapter called “A Pretty Original Sin”, when Manolito and his grandfather meet a mugger who turns out to be from Grandpa’s village.

Manolito Four-Eyes is extrememly funny and if you like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, you’ll enjoy this too.

I, meanwhile, have read what I realise is my third non-fiction book  set in the Second World War: The Zoo-Keeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman, based on the journals kept by the wife of the head of Warsaw zoo before and during the war.  It’s beautifully written and a very powerful read – shocking and terrifying, and intensely moving.  I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I’ve also included Uma Krishnaswami’s glorious The Grand Plan to Fix Everything as one of my books – I loved it, and if you missed my interview with Uma as part of her blog tour when the book came out in May, you can read it here.

Uma has herself signed up for The Reading the World Challenge – you can read  her book list here on her own blog, Writing with a Broken Tusk, and why she chose some of them here, in a great Guest Post Uma wrote over at The Brain Lair about being a book traveller or a book tourist …

And Sandhya over at My Handful of the Sky has posted about the books she has read with her daughter: Hana’s Suitcase by Karen Levine as their non-fiction book, and Oranges in No Man’s Land by Elizabeth Laird, set in Lebanon during the 1975-1990 civil war.  Sandhya has scooped the non-fiction, poetry and local categories of the challenge into one book for her own read, A Poem for CRY - CRY being the non-profit Child Rights and You.

If you are taking part in the Challenge (and there is still probably just about time to squeeze it in before the end of the year, if you haven’t started yet!), do tell us what books you’ve read and leave a link to any posts you write about them.

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

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 is Jorge Luján’s Tarde de invierno/ Winter Afternoon, published by Groundwood Books – and without the original Spanish and the English lying alongside eachother, we would not have been able to appreciate so fully the simply gorgeous animation Jorge and his family produced of the book (watch it here). Some authors like Yuyi Morales effortlessly slide between English and Spanish (we love her delightful Señor Calavera and Grandma Beetle books, Just a Minute and Just in Case). Some books provide a parallel experience of language, like Demi’s Bamboo Hats and a Rice Cake or Ed Young’s Beyond the Great Mountains. None of these books is truly bilingual, in that they do not provide a similar reading experience regardless of which of the two languages you approach the story from – but they all offer a bridge between languages and cultures that is not to be understimated.

It would be very interesting to hear about the experiences and needs of truly bilingual parents and children. If you are bringing up bilingual children or have bilingual children in your class, do you or they seek out bilingual books? Are you frustrated by what’s out there – and what’s not? Do you have any special recommendations? We’d love to hear from you. And do go and take a look at the Speaking in Tongues Carnival.

So I couldn’t resist picking up Ed Young’s Red Thread (Philomel Books, 1993) when I came across it recently: and it’s a wonderful story, which grows in meaning the more you read it. Wei Gu is a young man who, having been orphaned as a boy, is keen to find a wife and be part of a family. Hearing that a matchmaker is going to be in the town of Quinge, he travels there and makes sure he is at the temple good and early – in fact, he is so early that it is still dark (and here, Young’s illustrations are particularly stunning). He meets an old man, a spirit who can tell him that the red thread connecting him to his future wife leads to a three-year-old girl, and that they will marry in fourteen years time. Not only that, but they can go together to see her right there and then. However, Wei Gu is disgusted that she is apparently the daughter of vegetable sellers; and he also finds her ugly. Horrifically, he orders his servant to murder the child – but the red thread cannot be broken so easily and when Wei Gu marries fourteen years later, he discovers that the flower seed his beautiful wife always wears between her eyebrows carries a not unfamiliar story with it…

The narrative is simple but still manages to convey psychological depth; and the complexities inherent in the story mean that the book will grow with young readers. The act of violence is shocking – but as is so often the case in fairy-tales (and I am particularly struck by parallels with the western Snow White here), young readers/listeners will probably be less affected by it than the grown-ups reading it to them. The message that you can’t outrun your destiny is clear – but all the same, Wei Gu is lucky after his wicked act to end up with a loving wife who still loves him, even when the truth comes out.

A red thread runs throughout the book, straight across the pages, separating the text from the main focus of the illustrations, which completely fill each double-page spread. There are grandiose architectural spaces, busy market scenes and energetic close-ups, all depicted in a beautiful pallette of blues and greens, with orange as a striking outline color. In fact, as far as Young’s illustrations go, this for me is right up there as one of my favorites.

Now, there’s a question: which books by Ed Young are your and your children’s favorites? I am being very kind putting it in the plural, because I would find it very hard to narrow it down to just one myself!