Taruja Parande,
My Grandfather, Aajoba
Tulika, 2010.

Ages 5-8

A granddaughter’s tribute to her beloved grandfather, My Grandfather, Aajoba invites young readers to share in the very special bond portrayed, and perhaps to refer it to their own lives. The book’s author Taruja Parande has created a portrait of her grandfather through a series of anecdotes set off by illustrations that are an effective and attractive blend of photographic collage and original artwork.

Each double-page spread presents a different chapter in Parande and Aajoba’s relationship, with extra, playful asides, such as inviting readers to “flick a bunch of these pages quickly to hear the flapping of pigeons’ wings”. The book begins with pages from both an old and a more recent photograph album. The overlaid narrative conveys a contrasting description of Aajoba as a “tough” young man (“everyone was afraid of him. He was afraid of nobody.”) and as a “lovable” old man (“He was amused by everything I did […] I was never afraid of him”). From then on, the visual and verbal narratives both revolve around the grandfather and his grandchild – from Aajoba’s recipe for buttered toast, illustrated photographically step by step; through activities such as attempting to wash the cat or evading homework; to stamp albums and lists. A chapter is also dedicated to “the secret” – how Aajoba and Aaji met. Here the tone of secrecy is perfect for young readers and it is easy to imagine delighted, conspiratorial giggles at this point: after all, isn’t this just the kind of family story children love to hear?

Although the perspective is clearly that of an adult looking back and remembering, the matter-of-fact tone never drifts into nostalgia. The narrative is past tense so most young readers will know, even if it’s subconsciously, that Aajoba is no longer alive. In fact, this would be a special book to read with children coping with the loss of a grandparent. And it would also come as no surprise to find that after reading My Grandfather, Aajoba young readers set about creating their own grandparent storybooks: for not only does this delightful book draw readers into the solid reality of the relationship portrayed, but it also provides space for those readers’ own imaginations to come into play.

Marjorie Coughlan
May 2011

Kavita Singh Kale,
Avneet Aunty’s Mobile Phone
(English-Hindi version) Tulika Publishers, India, 2006.

Ages 3-8

“Miaow! I am Chikki” says the turquoise cat on the first page of Kavita Singh Kale’s Avneet Aunty’s Mobile Phone. Chikki’s pink tongue laps at a bowl of milk; a red hand tickles her tummy; her whiskers extend from two rosy round cheeks. On the following page, we meet Gagan, a boy dressed in red polka dots and lying on an orange bed, his turquoise hat the color of his cat. By the third page, when Gagan’s grandmother appears in burgundy and pink on a purple carpet, a stairway winding up the orange wall behind her, there is no doubt that we’re in India.

And we’re prepared, a little, for the mad arrival of Avneet aunty, her pink scarf and white braid flying behind her as she rushes past Gagan and Chikki, her mouth open, her teeth showing, her glasses askew almost down to her nose ring. We’re hardly surprised when her curly-toed shoe lands on poor Chikki’s tail.

Avneet aunty is a gregarious sort, a lady who is never without her mobile phone. Good luck on Gagan and Chikki getting to hear the story his grandmother had promised to tell them. Avneet aunty only stops talking when her phone rings, and then only to begin talking again. There’s a scary moment when Chikki sails over Avneet aunty in a game of tag with Gagan, and the phone goes sailing too. Crash! But all is well, of course, in the end, in this delightfully wacky picture book.

Animation film designer Kale’s exuberant illustrations will bring characters and setting vividly alive for young children, Indian or western. The spare text, 149 words in English, the equally terse Hindi below, adds to the exoticness of her remarkable little treasure.

Tulika Publishers, based in Chennai, India, specializes in bilingual books for children, with books in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, and Bangla. Avneet Aunty’s Mobile Phone is published in five bilingual editions (English with Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Bangla, and Hindi). It’s exciting to have a window into the multi-dimensional cultural world that Indian children experience through Tulika books. And who would have thought a western pre-schooler’s first bilingual English-Hindi book might be about a goofy lady’s cell phone?

Charlotte Richardson
March 2011

It’s not too late to join this year’s Reading the World Challenge if you haven’t already – just take a look at this post for details.

In our family we have all joined together and read picture books set in Mongolia, which is our current focus on PaperTigers. I had to hunt around a bit but we came up with a good selection. I’m not going to go into a great deal of detail here as they are all gathered up in my Personal View, Taking a step into children’s books about Mongolia. We have really enjoyed delving into the culture and heritage of Mongolia and these picture books have been read all together and individually.

One bedtime Older Brother read Horse Song: the Naadam of Mongolia by Ted and Betsy Lewin (Lee and Low, 2008) to Little Brother – quite a long read and they were both engrossed. Watching them from the outside, as it were, I came to an added appreciation of the dynamics of Ted and Betsy’s collaboration, both in the energy of their shared enthusiasm and participation in the events surrounding the famous horse-race, and also of being struck by a busy, crowded scene one page and then giggling at the turn of expression on an individual study’s face the next.

And I’ll just share with you Little Brother’s reaction to Suho’s White Horse, which you can read about in a bit more detail in my Books at Bedtime post earlier this week:

It was a moving story. The governor made me angry because he broke his word and was cruel to Suho and his horse.
[Listening to the musical version played on the Mongolian horsehead fiddle, the morin khuur] Once you know the story, you can tell which part of the music is telling which part of the story. How do they make that music with just two strings? It fills me with awe.

I also read The Horse Boy: A Father’s Miraculous Journey to Heal His Son by Rupert Isaacson (Viking, 2009), an amazing story of a family’s journey to Mongolia in search of horses and shamans to seek healing for the torments that were gripping their five-year-old autistic son’s life: as Isaacson puts it with great dignity, his “emotional and physical incontinence”. If you have already read this humbling, inspiring book (and even if you haven’t), take a look at this recent interview three years on from their adventurous journey. Now I need to see the film!

And talking of films (which we don’t very often on PaperTigers, but I can’t resist mentioning this one), The Story of the Weeping Camel is a beautiful, gentle film that takes you right to the heart of Mongolian life on the steppe. Who would have thought a documentary film about a camel could be so like watching a fairy tale? Don’t be put off by the subtitles – our boys love this film. Take a look at the trailer -

But now it’s time to leave Mongolia and find out what everyone else has been reading… (more…)

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…)

We’re delighted to welcome Out of the Way! Out of the Way! on this the third day of the book’s blog tour, when it will also be visiting Tarie at Asia in the Heart, World on the Mind.

Written by Uma Krishnaswami, illustrated by Uma Krishnaswamy and newly published by Tulika Books in eight languages, it is a delightful and deceptively simple story. A small boy finds a tree seedling in the middle of a path and puts some stones around it to protect it. As time goes by, the tree grows, the path changes its course to go round the tree, and becomes a road and then a major thoroughfare with urban spread growing up around it. Meanwhile, we see the boy become a young man, a father and a grandfather. The illustrations contextualise the story in its Indian setting and extend the detail of the narrative, showing nature and development growing together. The tree is a landmark, a meeting place; the road takes people at different paces to their various destinations – and there’s always someone in a hurry, shouting “Out of the Way! Out of the Way!”

You can read a full review by Pooja Makhijani at Chicken Spaghetti from yesterday’s Blog Tour stop. I was also fascinated to read in Saffron Tree’s interview with (writer) Uma that part of her inspiration for the story came from her father reading a newspaper story to her about trees being planted in pot-holes to protest against the state of roads.

For our PaperTigers leg of the Blog Tour, I’m excited to present some artwork created in response to Out of the way! Out of the Way!. On Friday, I had the enormous pleasure of spending the afternoon with Class 2 (Ages 5-7) at St Benedict’s RC Primary School in Ampleforth, North Yorkshire (UK). We set the scene by looking at photographs from I is for Inda by Prodeepta Das (Frances Lincoln, 1996) and then read the story together, with plenty of resounding participation.

We looked closely at the illustrations, which are an effective blend of color and black ink vignettes, and picked out lots of details (you can see some of them here). Then the children divided into two groups to create their own artwork -

one group painting:

and the other working to draw detailed outlines first in pencil and then over the top in black ink.

Everything was then brought together into the final collage – and I’m sure you’ll all agree they’ve created a beautiful work of art.

.

…Here are some details (note the footprints in the first one and the baskets, goats and skyscrapers in the second):

You can see all these photos and a couple more details over on our Flickr site…

Thank you, Mrs Andrew and Class 2 at St Benedict’s, for such a lovely afternoon; and thank you, Uma and Uma, for inviting PaperTigers to share in Out of the Way! Out of the Way!‘s blog tour.

Now it’s time to get out of the way as the book continues its journey – you can see where it’s headed here…

Newly published Out of the Way! Out of the Way! by Uma Krishnaswami and illustrated by Uma Krishnaswamy (Tulika Books, 2010) begins its blog tour today at Educating Alice, where you can read her students’ reviews of the book; and Saffron Tree, where there’s an intriguing Q&A with (writer) Uma, as well as the book title in all of its available languages/scripts…

Also, do read Uma’s explanation of the book’s format – I found it fascinating…

And we can’t wait to be hosting Out of the Way! Out of the Way! on Wednesday. Don’t miss it!

Here’s the whole schedule (I’ll update links to the actual posts as the week progresses): (more…)

Head on over to Uma Krishnaswami’s Writing with a Broken Tusk to see a presentation from Tulika Books called “Multilingual Publishing – Walking the Tightrope” – it’s quite a long read but definitely worth it. Presenting different languages in children’s books is something I’ve been musing for a while – especially after reading Patsy Aldana’s interview with PaperTigers recently, in which she said:

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…

..and also having just read Nancy Bo Flood’s Warriors in the Crossfire, which raises dilemmas of language/writing in a colonial language (look out for our review in our June issue).

This is definitely a topic that needs to be pursued further…

As a fan of Shen’s Books I was delighted to see publisher Renee Ting and author Emily Jing partenering up on Shen’s blog to bring us “Crossing Cultural Borders,” a 6-week series of posts about different themes and issues related to multicultural literature for young readers. We encourage you to follow the series and contribute by adding your views.

You may also want to swing by The Miss Rumphius Effect to read Tricia’s post on evaluating books from the viewpoint of other cultures. And over at Writing With A Broken Tusk, author Uma Krishnaswami brings up the question of whether or not multicultural children’s literature has been successful in its attempts to cross cultural borders. Her question was prompted by the article “Questioning Cultural Stereotypes Through Children’s Books” by Tulika managing editor, Radhika Menon.

All well worth your blog-hopping journey.