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.

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.

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…)