Reading Broadly

I keep a list on Goodreads of "award possibilities" each year. It's mostly Newbery; this year it's pretty much all Newbery. (I did not love them all. They're just part of the discussion.) Here are the titles on my list with authors and/or protagonists who I know to be people of color, plus a few that are still on my shelf, waiting to be read.

Hidden, Helen Frost
Drawing From Memory, Allen Say
Can I See Your ID? True Stories of False Identities, Chris Barton (some stories)
Jefferson's Sons, Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
The Grand Plan to Fix Everything, Uma Krishnaswami
Lunch-Box Dream, Tony Abbott
Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor
Trapped, Marc Aronson
The Great Wall of Lucy Wu, Wendy Shang
Words in the Dust, Trent Reedy
Inside Out and Back Again, Thanhha Lai
The Queen of Water, Laura Resau / Maria Virginia Farinango
Heart and Soul, Kadir Nelson
Bird in a Box, Andrea Davis Pinkney
Never Forgotten, Patricia McKissack

Close to Famous, Joan Bauer


and a shoutout for Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys, about a cultural minority.

What have I left off?

Celebrate with Confetti Girl

"It's exactly like Spanish class," I emailed my brother a little over a year ago from Oaxaca, Mexico, where I was spending Christmas. "I mean, people are literally running around hitting each other over the head with eggs full of confetti."

"REALLY?" he responded. We were surprised, and delighted.

Four of the six Burton siblings studied Spanish in high school. We succeeded in learning very little Spanish, but boy, did we learn a lot about La Llorona and pinatas and El Dia de los Muertos and... cascarones, the aforementioned eggs full of confetti, which feature prominently in the delightful Confetti Girl.

I enjoyed so many things about Confetti Girl that I've tried to write this review five times already today, because I couldn't figure out what to focus on. Like Kate Messner's The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z, Confetti Girl stars a protagonist who is a smart-but-not-bookish girl. I don't think we could ever have enough of those in fiction aimed at middle school students.

In one of my favorite scenes, protagonist Lina and her friend Vanessa sell cascarones at the school fair, which results in--naturally--confetti everywhere. It's a scene that's joyous and authentic, and it didn't surprise me when I found out that author Diana Lopez teaches middle school. But for all its joie-de-vivre, Confetti Girl never descends to High School Musical-level hokiness.

Or to Lurlene McDaniel maudlinness. Because, you see, it could have--Lina's mother died unexpectedly not long ago, and Lina's father shows signs of clinical depression, and Lina is in charge of cooking dinner every night, and she has to get help with buying "girl stuff" from her best friend's mother--do you feel like you read this book in middle school twenty years ago? It isn't like that, I promise.

In another parallel with Gianna Z, there's a lot going on in this book. The loss of a parent, single parenthood, early romance, middle school friendships, environmental science, sports, poor grades; but it is all woven together beautifully by Lopez, and infused in every part with Latino culture in a way that is neither forced nor didactic. It will not feel confusing to girls of other cultures, nor, I think, tiresome to the most culturally aware Latina girls.

You have kids waiting for Confetti Girl in your homes and your schools. It'd be an excellent choice for these mother-daughter book clubs I keep hearing about. And from the depths of my inexperience, I'm going to guess that it'd be a successful hand-sell.

Oh, how I wish this book had gotten some Pura Belpre recognition. It is full of life and pure joy.

Demand Diversity at Midwinter

"Hi, I'm a middle school librarian, and I'm especially looking for fiction with multi-ethnic characters to share with my students."

Really, it wasn't a trick question. I wasn't a plant. Actually I was thrilled, beyond measure, to be at ALA Annual for the first time. I was over the moon as I walked around the exhibit floor, brushing past famous authors at every turn (Sarah Dessen! Sherman Alexie! Jacqueline Woodson! Laurie Halse Anderson! For a book lover, it was like being at the Academy Awards). And I wanted to bring something back to the 1000+ students in my diverse urban public school, so when I stopped at publisher booths I asked, "Could you please show me some books with multi-ethnic characters to share with my students?"

My request was greeted with polite puzzlement. Mildly frantic hunting around the booth. Offers of good middle-school titles about white main characters. The answer I remember most clearly came from the Penguin employee who thought hard for a moment, then said brightly, "What about NONfiction!" and presented me with an advance copy of Marching for Freedom.

I was pleased to have an ARC for Marching for Freedom. I purchased Marching for Freedom for my school library. But oh, what a disappointing response to my question.

Colleen Mondor's post Demand Diversity in Publishing is very timely, as ALA Midwinter begins this weekend. I hope ALA members and visitors will read my post, and hers, and start conversations on the exhibit floor. Every publisher will have at least one book to offer. Ask for more.

Look for some of the new books like Eighth-Grade Superzero (Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic) and One Crazy Summer (Amistad/HarperCollins). Then demand MORE.

***
At ALA Annual I went to a YALSA session called Strengthen Your YA Collection with Small Press/Diverse Publishers. I also looked for diverse publishers on the exhibit floor. Since Annual I've gotten some great book recommendations and resources from the e-newsletters, websites, and Twitter posts of these publishers. Take a look.

Pinata Books/Arte Publico Press (@artepublico)
Brown Barn Books
Cinco Puntos Press
Curbstone Press
Just Us Books
Lee & Low Books (@leeandlow)
Rolling Hills Press

Harlequin is not a small publisher, but I want to mention that they highlighted diverse books for teens at Annual with the Kimani TRU imprint.

Updating to add more publishers:
Charlesbridge Publishing
Groundwood Books
First Second Books (guess they're not a small publisher, but a photo on Fuse #8 from Midwinter reminded me how great they are and that they publish ethnically diverse graphic novels)
Tu Publishing (new, first books coming in 2010)

The Indigo Notebook or Why I Ate Quinoa Last Night

I'm a big fan of Laura Resau's first two books, What the Moon Saw and Red Glass. (Disclaimers are so in right now that I feel like I should put that at the bottom--Disclaimer: I do not know Laura Resau, but I really like her other books and I read her blog sometimes.) When I heard that she'd just started a new series, I was pleased but surprised. YA series are not the most common thing (despite the fact that almost every book seems to be one of a trilogy these days), so I sort of assumed we were looking at something Babysitters Club-esque, or maybe like SASS, which it sort of resembles on the surface. Nope. Not. At. All. (I confess that I have yet to make it all the way through a single SASS book, even though I love the idea; I was hooked on this from the first paragraph.)

Resau's new Notebook series follows 15-year-old Zeeta and her mother, Layla, an itinerant ESL teacher. Each year of Zeeta's life they've moved to a new country. You know Layla now, don't you? You already know that she wears wrap skirts and quotes Rumi. What keeps Layla from being a cliche? You met her when you went to Thailand and Guatemala and Ireland. She's real.

And your mind is already turning, isn't it, thinking of what it would be like to have Layla for a mother? I am completely in love with Zeeta. If I wanted to be anyone else when I was fifteen, it was her. She's pretty and interesting and comfortable with all kinds of people and speaks seven languages fluently (over a dozen not so fluently) and somehow escapes being annoying. She's like Polly O'Keefe without the self-absorption. I'm afraid I'm making her sound like a Mary Sue, and in fact I do sort of wish she had more flaws, but I swear, to read Zeeta is to love her. I'm so looking forward to traveling all over the world with her. (Next stop: Provence.)

This first book in the series takes place in Ecuador, and the first sign that I wasn't in Babysitters Club territory was the richness of setting. It's obvious that Resau knows her Ecuador, but it comes out of her naturally, without delving into travelogue territory. The last two days I felt like I WAS in Ecuador, and so the only possible thing I could have for dinner last night was Ecuadorean quinoa vegetable soup from Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes--you may think you've never been that interested in going to Ecuador, but after reading this book, I predict you'll be looking up plane fares.

The setting and lovely characters are definitely the strengths of the book; to be honest, it gets a little overdramatic in the last part with a lot of cloak-and-dagger stuff, and maybe a little sentimental about international adoption (Zeeta's buddy is an American boy who was adopted from Ecuador as a baby and is back seeking his roots). But those characters! That setting! The food!

Now, I don't know how long Resau plans to make this series; I think it will be a challenge to keep it from being too Cherry Ames, with a new love interest and a dramatic mystery for Zeeta in every country. But if anyone can do it, I think it's Resau, who just keeps coming up with creative and original takes on YA. The fact that Zeeta and Layla stay in each place for a year will help, because that gives enough time to really develop the situation; it won't be like Zeeta is facing a near-death experience or being held for ransom every month.

I think your bright middle-schoolers and maybe high-schoolers will love this series. I was desperate to travel when I was that age, and it seems like something even more teens aspire to now. Zeeta is both a real girl (multiracial, by the way) and a wish-fulfillment fantasy, something YA can never have enough of.

You know you want to see Ed Young illustrate "One Night in Bangkok".

My brother-in-law (and Laurie's husband), Matthew Amster-Burton, has written both a delicious book about kids and food and a guest post for this blog.

Looking for a picture book set in modern New York City? I can think of about a hundred. How about a picture book set in historical, mythical, or rural Asia? Plenty of those, too.

But where are the picture books set in modern Asian cities? I'll bet you can't name many, and that's a shame. It gives English language readers an inaccurate image of Asia (all rice paddies and pagodas) and robs us of a potential treasure trove of children's stories.

Why the missing books? I have an idea. Come on a short trip with me; when we get back, I'm going to recommend some books.

1
I went to a slide presentation by Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee, author of two great Korean cookbooks. She talked about regional food and sightseeing in Korea (she's also the author of Frommer's South Korea). She showed at least fifty slides, of which one or two were taken in Seoul. There were several slides of an ersatz rural community set up for tourists, like a Korean Colonial Williamsburg. About half of all South Koreans live in Seoul or its outskirts. Seoul is one of the largest, most technologically advanced, safest, and presumably delicious cities on earth.

2
Around the same time, I had dinner with Dan Gray, a Korean food writer who has a blog called Seoul Eats. We talked a lot about Korean food and I told him that I'd never been to Korea but really wanted to go. He offered encouragement and a warning. "You have to understand," he said, extending his arm to indicate green Seattle, "Seoul isn't beautiful."

3
My five-year-old, Iris, is a fan of this cartoon called Ni Hao, Kai-Lan. Kai-Lan is a Chinese-American girl whose best friends are a monkey, a koala, a tiger, and a rhino.

Recently we watched a special 45-minute episode, "Kai-Lan's Great Trip to China," where the whole crew flies to China to visit Kai-Lan's great aunt and meet a baby panda. The first thing they do in China is stop at a roadside stand for dandan noodles. I heartily approved. Then they arrive at the aunt's house, which is a rural mansion.

Soon it's time to shop for presents for the baby panda's naming ceremony, so the crew goes into the city. The city looks like the China pavilion at Epcot, only with fewer people. The funny thing is, actual cities in China look a lot like this artist's conception of the original plan for Epcot.

4
We read a lovely picture book called Erika-san, by Allen Say. Erika moves to Japan to become a teacher. She begins in Tokyo, which she finds overwhelming. She moves on to a smaller city. Still
overwhelming. She ends up in a rural area, where she learns the tea ceremony and marries a Japanese man. The real Japan, the book seemed to imply, isn't in the city.

Phooey, I say.

In 2000, Laurie and I went to Bangkok. It was our first trip to Asia. We brought the Lonely Planet book, some travel pants from Lands' End, and a Seattle-honed appetite for Thai food. We arrived in the city at night, breathed a lot of diesel fumes, ate some bland stir-fried chicken from a street cart, and checked into our fleabag hotel thinking maybe we'd made a mistake.

In the morning, everything looked a lot better. We found a new, clean hotel with air conditioning. We rode the river taxi up and down the Chao Phraya. We ate perfect fried fish at a restaurant called Cabbages and Condoms, perfect grilled chicken at Sara-Jane's, and many perfect things at street carts. To say that the best food I ever ate was in Bangkok would be a huge understatement. Compared to the food I ate in Bangkok, most of what I eat isn't even food.

We spent a week in Bangkok and didn't bother with any side trips. A lot of people in Seattle, especially young people, have been to Thailand, and everyone we spoke to found our trip puzzling. You mean you didn't go to the beach? To the floating market? To meet the hill tribes? Isn't Bangkok a cesspool of traffic and sex tourism?

Because I'd been to Bangkok, I knew what Dan Gray meant when he said Seoul wasn't beautiful. Bangkok is, well, ugly. There's a whole lot of dirty concrete. It's also wonderful, with unexpected glimpses of beauty everywhere, like smooth mounds of colorful curry paste at the market, orchid sellers on the street, a truck piled high with pineapples.

Rice paddies and historical Asian architecture are picturesque in a way a Bangkok streetscape isn't. Instead of seeing this as an artistic challenge, authors and illustrators (or maybe publishers) have largely surrendered. Imagine if Ezra Jack Keats looked around the streets of New York and said, "Nothing to see here; I think I'll head to Central Park."

When I traveled in Asia (specifically Bangkok and Vientiane), I saw children involved in all sorts of play, especially rambunctious, unstructured street play, the kind American parents like to lament the passing of. I'm not saying urban Asia is a children's paradise, but--like Keats's New York--it's a rich and untapped well of stories.

The few urban Asian picture books I've found have left me with an appetite for many, many more. Here are a couple of my favorites, mostly set in Japan:

* The Way We Do It in Japan, Geneva Cobb Iijima, ill. Paige Billin-Frye. Gregory grew up in the US but moves to Tokyo with his parents when his (Japanese-American) father is assigned to the Tokyo office. They live in a small apartment outside Tokyo. Gregory has to get used to rice and fish for breakfast; putting his bed in a cupboard every day; Japanese toilets; and school. This book wrings a lot of interest out of the profoundly ordinary, but my favorite thing about it is how it shows, without saying it outright, that a lot of things about being in a new country are cool and annoying at the same time. This is a perennial favorite in our house, even though the end is kind of dumb. (Also, according to School Library Journal, "some of the 'way we do it...' elements are a bit stereotypical of the traditional way of Japanese life." I'm not sure whether this supports or negates my thesis.)

* Tokyo Friends, Betty Reynolds; My Japan, Etsuko Watanabe. These are essentially vocabulary books, not great for reading aloud, but with fabulous, colorful artwork. Reynolds is the author of a series of adult picture books about Japan, the best of which is Squeamish About Sushi. My Japan has a great page about Japanese food which includes like ten of Iris's favorite foods.

* City I Love. This book combines poems by Lee Bennett Hopkins with artwork by Marcellus Hall. It does a great job of making Asian cities seem dramatic and cool. The Tokyo page features the dazzle of Ginza, complete with wild-eyed anime characters, and the Shanghai page highlights the insane Shanghai skyline. There's a fun scavenger hunt aspect to the book; on each page you need to find the traveling dog and figure out which city he's in. (Cities from every continent feature in the book, not just Asia.)

City kids--all kids--in the West deserve to know more about their counterparts worldwide. To cover one of my favorite continents, I'd like to see more good urban picture books set in China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and elsewhere in Asia.

Thanks, Matthew. Hungry Monkey includes kid- and adult-friendly recipes for pad thai, larb gai, and bibimbop, as well as an appendix with kids' books about food.

First Paragraph Awe

I've been looking forward to The Indigo Notebook (out this month) for AGES, and I've had the ARC for a while but I've been saving it. I just opened to the first paragraph (quoted from ARC, obviously), and I am SO HAPPY:

It's always the same, no matter where in the world we happen to be. Just when I get used to noodle soup for breakfast in Laos, or endless glasses of supersweet mint tea in Morocco, or crazy little tuk tuk taxis in Thailand, Layla gets that look in her eyes, that faraway, wistful look, as though she's squinting at a movie in the distance, and on the screen is a place more exotic, more dazzling, more spiritual than wherever we are.

Sometimes--very, very occasionally--a book will say to me "Here, Wendy. This was written especially for you."

Strings Attached

Ten years ago a customer at the University Book Store asked me to recommend a novel for a teenage girl who was a musician. A YA book featuring a musician sounded like an easy request. So many teenagers are musicians, after all. Somehow, though, the search sputtered. There may even have been a reference to Little Women--Beth played the piano!--in my desperation.

Faced with that request today (booksellers and librarians always remember the ones that got away), I would now have two great novels to recommend. Is a duet enough to constitute a new girl-who-plays-strings mini-genre?

Violinist Patti Yoon focuses on being Good Enough--good enough to get into HarvardYalePrinceton, the pinnacle of her Korean-born parents' dreams. Patti sacrifices normal teenage fun for homework, violin, and church, until she decides to rebel--just a bit--and figure out what she really wants out of life. Good Enough is a Korean-American story, with the bi bim bap and bulgogi recipes to prove it, but it has a universal appeal for smart teenagers.

In If I Stay, seventeen-year-old Mia's cello *is* a rebellion, since her parents are laid-back rock music listeners. Mia's life is all about normal teenage fun, plus cello, until the day her life is suddenly only about IVs, tubes, and the four walls of her room in the ICU. Her parents' music, her boyfriend's band music, Mia's own classical favorites, all become a soundtrack as she hovers between life and death. If the "it's the next Twilight!" buzz around If I Stay turns you off, know that this is a small, powerful story about family, with real characters and an Oregon setting that will ring true to natives.

Musicians or not, teenage girls will really like reading about both Patti and Mia.

More novels about teenage musicians (via NoveList):
Bowler, Tim. Firmament.
Brooks, Bruce. Midnight Hour Encores.
Frank, Lucy. Lucky Stars.
Gilbert, Barbara Snow. Broken Chords.
Going, K. L. Fat Kid Rules the World.
Hughes, Mark Peter. Lemonade Mouth.
Okimoto, Jean Davies. Talent Night.
Simmons, Michael. Vandal.
Strasser, Todd. Rock 'n' Roll Nights.
Thesman, Jean. Cattail Moon.
Townley, Roderick. Sky.

After Tupac and D Foster, Homophobia, and Newbery Reactions

I first read After Tupac and D Foster (Jacqueline Woodson) last fall, when Heavy Medal chose it as one of the shortlist books for the Mock Newbery. I liked it a lot, even if I didn't think it was perfect. But right away I shut my mind to the idea of it winning the Newbery.

I had various reasons to give; I remember saying, during the mock-discussion, "I would never be bringing this up if we weren't analyzing this so closely, because it's a great book, but--" and mentioning some point about the text and plot development. Eventually I even voted for it to receive one of the mock-honors and was pleased when it was chosen.

But a couple of days before the real awards were announced, I recognized the real reason I didn't want to consider After Tupac as a possible Newbery winner. I didn't want to deal with the aftermath if it won.

I'm really enjoying reading discussion about the awards on various blogs, including dissent--is The Graveyard Book a fully-developed novel? what was wrong with Chains? how could they ignore Wabi Sabi?-- even the (to me very odd) suggestion that the non-standard English in After Tupac keeps it from being literary enough. (...would the same argument apply to the non-standard English in, say, Huckleberry Finn?)

But homophobia is hard for me to shake off sometimes. And I really didn't like the idea of reading blogs and even newspaper articles, the day after After Tupac might have won the Newbery, and reading veiled and not-so-veiled opinions about the Newbery committee "pushing an agenda" and choosing a book that "is not right for the children in my library" and that "I couldn't possibly use in my classroom".

After Tupac and D Foster is, at its center, about the friendship of three girls in the 1990s who love Tupac Shakur's music. One of the girls has a brother who's gay, and also in prison. There's a lengthy scene in the book where two of the girls and the man's family visit him there. A sample:

"What's the first thing you gonna do when you get home, Tash?" I asked.

"Girl, you know I'm gonna get my hair twisted, make myself a cute drink and get myself over to the river and see my people!"

The river was where all the gay guys hung out. Sometimes Tash took me and Neeka with him when he went to hang out with his "girls". I loved going because all the other queens always made such a fuss over us, telling us how beautiful we were and how we'd grow up to give somebody "fever" one day.

"Some of the children came to see me last week and they were like Girl, how is you living up in here?!"

I laughed, trying to imagine Tash's queenie friends looking around the gray walls and dirty floor and barred-up windows.

(After Tupac and D Foster, Jacqueline Woodson, p 104)

So let's pause for a sec and talk about voice, because voice is what really makes this novel stand out--what makes it, in my opinion, "also truly distinguished". The narrator's voice is so true and believable throughout the book that it's almost hard to believe she isn't a real person. And I found the voices of all the supporting characters equally impressive--the above is a great example. Doesn't the narrator's response sound exactly like what a comfortable 12-year-old would be thinking? Doesn't Tash feel like a real person that you could walk down to the prison or the river and meet yourself? Can't you see all his friends visiting the prison and looking around the visitation room in horror? And just mentioning "the river" adds another element to how this novel deals with place. Even though Tash is lucky in his family and friends, he still has his own place with his own people. He doesn't belong totally in the neighborhood, the way the girls do.

It doesn't really get more explicit than this. There are some veiled references to the dangers of being obviously gay in prison that I think will probably go over the heads of most kids (but if they don't, I don't have a problem with that, either). But there's certainly no chance of missing that Tash is gay, and his family and friends accept him. And I knew that would be too much for some people.

A lot of people don't like it when the term "homophobia" is applied to them, because, they say, they aren't "afraid" of gay people. But they do show fear--the fear of their kids "becoming" gay, usually, and a fear of having to talk with their kids about what "gay" is and whether it's right or wrong or neither. These are the people who are thinking--for subject matter, anyway--that After Tupac shouldn't have been given a Newbery honor.

I like talking with people about gay issues, usually, whether they agree with me or not. Often I have to hold back laughter when I'm talking with (or reading the blog posts of) people who are well-meaning but extremely naive, or people who have totally ridiculous reasons for their anti-gay beliefs. But I think this year... maybe I've had enough of homophobia. I live in California.

So I didn't want to think about what might happen if After Tupac and D Foster (a book that I would say is appropriate, reading and interest-level wise, for kids about 11 and up) won the Newbery. There's almost never as much discussion about the Honor books (which is too bad, of course). So I'm only hearing the occasional comment about After Tupac being "really for older readers", or, as one blogger put it, this is most definitely a young adult novel, and deals with gangs, violence, prison, and mentiones homosexual prison affairs. So unless you want to be explaining that . . .

But since this isn't all about my personal comfort, I'm delighted to think of the range of children, parents, and teachers who will be reading this book now and identifying with these girls who embrace their brother's gayness. To my knowledge, this is the first Newbery book (winner or honor) that clearly contains LGBTQ content. (I haven't read that many of the recent honors, so if anyone knows of others, please tell me. I think A Solitary Blue has gay themes, but it's... well, not explicit, but I want to believe it so much that I'm NOT going to write Cynthia Voigt and ask her, because if it isn't, I don't want to know.) Thanks, committee, and thanks, Jacqueline Woodson.