Over on the main PaperTigers website we have just posted our new Book of the Month, following our current theme of War and Peace in children’s books. The recently published We Are All Born Free: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Pictures (Frances Lincoln, 2008, in association with Amnesty International) couldn’t be a more apt choice and I can’t resist sharing with you this wonderful image of its book cover in 25 of the 30 languages it has so far been translated into! It is a superb book, in which, as I said in my review (you can read the whole thing here),

Amnesty International has simplified the language of all 30 articles to make them accessible to young people; and a glittering array of internationally renowned illustrators has been brought together to convey a powerful visual interpretation of the text…

Achockablog gives a complete list of the illustrators here, as well as photos of some of them with their illustrations.

There’s also a short film based on five of the illustrations – great school assembly material.

At this time of the year, people often travel for the holiday season.  Getting in cars, planes, or trains, people now traverse continents and oceans easily.  But what if you were an iceberg from the north pole who wants to visit kin in the south pole?  That is what the story of Lulie the Iceberg is all about.  Lulie, whose name comes from the Greenlandic word, iluliaq, is an iceberg who hears from his friend, Kiki the Arctic Tern, that there are icebergs on the other side of the world.  Lulie decides to visit them — an undertaking of massive proportion, to say the least!  After breaking off a glacial ice field, he sets off on a perilous journey southwards to the Antarctic.  He has many exciting encounters on the way and must make a decision that will affect his very existence in the dangerously warm waters near the equator.

Although it might seem a stretch of the imagination to believe an Arctic iceberg could make it to the Antarctic, icebergs can indeed travel great distances.  In the glossary of the book, reports of iceberg sightings in North Africa and the Azores are mentioned.   Perhaps now, in the age of global warming, these reports will only be all the more common.  Lulie the Iceberg is, in fact, intended to educate children about polar environments. Princess Hisako of Takamado who wrote the book, in conjunction with illustrator, Warabe Aska, was inspired by her visits to the polar regions of Greenland.  “I wondered where an iceberg calving off an ice sheet would want to travel once it was free to move.” The book, published a decade ago with proceeds going to UNICEF, has since been turned into a play and remains a delightful and informative work to this day.

Bookaroo, India’s first ever festival of children’s literature took place November 22 and 23rd in New Delhi. Journalist Jai Arjun Singh attended the event and wrote an article about it in the Business Standard. He states:

“India’s first literature festival for children is a reminder of the expanding market in kids’ writing.

A few years ago, it would have been packed, end to end, with Enid Blytons and perhaps the occasional Dr Seuss book (frowned upon by parents because it wasn’t “meaningful enough” for young children). But now there’s an abundance of titles by Indian writers… — all of whom are present at this festival, hosting interactive sessions and workshops, and having a rollicking good time by the looks of it. And all of whom are refreshingly open-minded about the possibilities of children’s literature.

“We’ve finally outgrown the patronising idea that a good children’s book must have an obvious moral attached to it,” says Sayoni Basu, publishing director, Scholastic India, pointing out that it’s possible now for children’s writing in India to be fantastical, silly, irreverent, even dark, as long as it doesn’t get too negative. “People are realising that kids are tougher than they get credit for.”

Scholastic India alone has published around a hundred original children’s titles this year, and other publishers such as Pratham Books (which co-organised Bookaroo), Tara, and Puffin are expanding their catalogues too. Another key development, says Basu, is that the quality of illustrations has vastly improved: “a children’s book now looks like something you might actually want to pick up”.

“The idea that children don’t read nowadays is a vastly overstated one,” says [Indian children's author Sampurna] Chattarji. Going by the enthusiastic response to Bookaroo, she’s right.”

Jai Arjun Singh welcomes our readers to visit his blog where he has posted additional information about Bookaroo as well as photos of the event. Click here and here. You can also visit Pratham Books’ blog to read more Bookaroo reviews.

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."

Winter can pack a wallop where I live in Canada.  Because it can be so severe, stories are often about survival.  The people who immigrate here learn to adjust to winter in often unique ways that contain traces of their origins and yet orient them to this climate.  In Thor, by W.D. Valgardson (illus. Ange Zhang,) we see an Icelandic Canadian boy go out with his grandfather who is a fisherman on Lake Winnipeg, to fetch fish from his nets.  It is the dead of winter.  “The snow was at the top of the fences, as high as the windows.  The snow was so cold it crunched under their feet like dried bread under Grandmother’s rolling pin.  Their breath made white clouds.”  Thor must wear two sets of clothing and a bushy, fur-lined hat with earflaps before they set out in his grandfather’s Bombardier.  While outside, Thor and his grandfather notice some snowmobilers driving recklessly over thin ice.  One of them falls in.  It is up to Thor to to rescue him.  Will he be able to do it?

In The Big Storm by Rhea Tregebov (illus. Maryann Kovalski,) we meet a Jewish girl named Jeanette and her cat, Kitty Doyle.   It is winter in north end Winnipeg.  On the day of a snow storm, Jeanette forgets about Kitty Doyle who comes to pick her up from school every day.  After school, Jeanette plays in the snow and goes over to her friend Polly’s for latkes.  At Polly’s, she suddenly remembers that Kitty has been waiting for her all this time.   She hurries out only to find Kitty huddled under the snow in an alleyway.  Is Jeanette too late?  Will Kitty Doyle survive?

Thor and The Big Storm are stories about winter where I live.   What about where you live?  What is winter like for you and your children?

There’s a lovely haiku by Basho about the first snow where he awaits the event with great anticipation, returning to his hut every time the clouds gather in the sky in early December.  He wants to be ready to write the words down as soon as he experiences the moment.  When the snow first came to our city in mid November, my daughter made me fetch a pair of cross country skis we’d acquired from a friend and set out into the slush with glee.  For the last few years we have had very warm, languorous autumns in my part of Canada, and this has oddly increased our anticipation of the first snow.

The seasons are often written about in poetry of every language.  This past summer, I stumbled on a children’s poetry book at a library cast-off sale.  It is called Seasons and is edited by the master anthologist, Alberto Manguel.  Manguel has selected poetry from all over the world and of different periods and languages that note, in some way, the seasons.  The book is illustrated by Japanese Canadian artist Warabe Aska who has a playful way of engaging the childish imagination with his pictures.  Often embedded in his colorful drawings are hidden pictures of animals or people.   My daughter delights in finding these images and this activity enhances her appreciation of the book’s contents.  For winter, there is this lovely poem by eleventh century Japanese court lady Sei Shonagon:

Snow

As though pretending to be blooms

The snowflakes scatter in the winter sky.

Accompanying the text, is Aska’s picture of a popcorn vendor in the park on a snowy day.  Popcorn, blooms — all are lovely metaphors, visual and literary, for snowflakes.  And so did my daughter and I feast our eyes this year on popcorn puffs and garden blooms in the otherwise dreary skies of November.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted at Lisa’s blog…

A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing in which a particular letter, or groups of letters, are missing.  Imagine writing a paragraph, for example, excluding the letter ‘e.’   It’s tougher than you think, especially, if you decide to omit vowels — the linguistic glue, as it were — between the consonants.  In A Voweller’s Bestiary, author JonArno Lawson takes a unique stab at the lipogrammatic genre.  He has created an alphabet book of animals based on vowel combinations, rather than on the usual initial letter form.  The lipogram part comes in when he excludes certain vowels from each set.  Sound complicated?  Well, what’s a constraint (and possible consternation!) for the poet in terms of rules can be a delight to the ear and eye of the reader.  And that is how a Voweller’s Bestiary was received by my son, listening to the contorted word music of “Ants and Aardvarks” or “Jaguar, Tarantula, Tangalunga” or “Tortoise, Porpoise, Crocodile.”  Reading poetry can attune your child to the sounds of language and help them appreciate the elasticity of words.

Another poetry book I tried out on my younger child was Rascally Rhymes by Jordan Troutt, illustrated by Sarah Preston-Bloor.  This book, also an alphabet one, takes names and makes ‘rascally rhymes’ with them.  There’s Ian who eats “worms and toads/and rocks and snails/a la mode.” or Gillian who “stomps like a gorillian.”  After we finished reading this book, my daughter and I went through all the names and tried to see if we knew anyone with the same name.  That was fun!  Palimpsest Press, who publishes this book, is now offering a contest on their blog for children to makes rhymes.  Reading this book definitely had an effect on my daughter.  While sorting laundry together the other night, she held up a sock and said “Mom, this sock doesn’t have a rhyme!”

We don’t often think of picture books when we think of book group titles, but this month, that’s what the Tiger’s Choice offers. It’s one that is an ideal selection for adults and children to read and discuss together–created by two men, Ken Mochizuki and Dom Lee,  who have provided a new defintion of what picture books can be.

Heroes follows their stunning debut, Baseball Saved Us, with a story as powerful and as provocative as their examination of the Japanese internment in the United States during World War Two. This time the story looks at peacetime America, and the difficulty of overcoming the vicious stereotyping that is the collateral damage of war.

One of the most moving and heroic stories from World War Two is the history of the Japanese American men who enlisted in the U.S. Army and formed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, fighting in Europe and becoming  “one of the most highly decorated units in U.S. Army history”–even though many of them had family members confined behind barbed wire fences in desolate internment camps. The strength of these soldiers’ patriotism and the bravery of their military exploits makes my hair stand on end when I read about them–and so does this book.

When Donnie plays war with the other kids, he’s always the enemy because, he’s told, “there wasn’t anybody looking like you on our side.” He knows that isn’t true. He’s heard his father and uncle talk about their time  in the Army ; he’s seen their war medals. Yet he’s told, “Real heroes don’t brag” and “You kids should be playing something else besides war.”

But the war games don’t stop–they become more real and more frightening–and Donnie needs help.

Please read this book and add your comments to our final Tiger’s Choice discussion.

Tonight I read Shin-chi’s Canoe by Nicola Campbell, illustrated by Kim LaFave to my daughter.  The story is a follow-up to Campbell’s earlier book Shi-shi-etko which narrates the story of a young aboriginal girl, Shi-shi-etko, as she is separated from her family at the age of six to attend a residential school.  In Shin-chi’s Canoe, Campbell returns to the same family but now it is time for Shi-shi-etko’s brother, Shin-chi to go to the same school with his sister.  Shin-chi is given a little carved canoe as a parting gift from his father and the boat will serve as a reminder during the cold cruel months ahead of a request Shin-chi has made of his father: namely, to build a dugout canoe for him when he returns home at the beginning of summer.

When this book arrived at our house, my daughter was immediately taken by it.  She and her classmates were all building boats to be launched at a nearby creek.  Can I show this book to my teacher?  She asked right away.  But we haven’t read it yet, I said.  We’ll read it tonight, I promise. At bedtime we curled up into bed and read Shin-Chi’s Canoe.  My daughter remained silent through the reading and at the end, she made a comment that struck me.  While I concentrated mostly on the social injustice of the aboriginal residential school experience, my daughter remembered instead the request Shin-chi made of his father, namely, the promise that he would have his own canoe by the end of that first year away at school.  See, his Daddy’s making the canoe just like Shin-chi asked, my daughter said.  Quite frankly, caught up as I was with the bigger social issue presented by the book, I had forgotten that simple request. I was amazed and humbled by my daughter’s observation. Truly, children have their own unique perspective.  That is why reading to them at bedtime can be so hugely rewarding.

Incidentally, November is National American Indian Heritage Month in the United States.  The story of Shin-chi and Shi-shi-etko is a great way to start educating young people about the history of aboriginal children’s lives in North America.

If you’ve had a chance to savor Yum! Mmm! Que Rico! America’s Sproutings, or any of the books in this year’s Américas Award list of winners, honor books and commended titles, you will understand how spot-on this award’s committee is in recognizing and honoring accurate portrayals of our Americas’ rich cultural heritage.

As this year’s winners, Pat Mora and Rafael Lopez‘s Yum! Mmm! Que Rico! and Laura Resau’s Red Glass will be honored tomorrow (Oct 4), at a ceremony at the Library of Congress, in Washington D.C. Hosted by the Library of Congress’s Hispanic Division and the Center for the Book, the event is free and open to the public, so don’t miss it if you are in the area!

Yuyi Morales’ Little Night, Jorge Argueta’s Alfredito Flies Home and Carmen T. Bernier’s Frida: Viva la Vida! are among the honored and commended titles selected by the award’s 2008 committee.

What better way to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month than by giving these books the recognition and readership they deserve?