Jayce A, Book Reviews

Ringgold, Faith. Tar Beach. New York: Crown Publishers, 1991. Print.

Tar Beach tells the delightful story of a young black girl who dreams big as she flies with her little brother over the skyscrapers of 1930’s New York City. Cassie Louise Lightfoot, the flying dreamer, and Be Be, her brother, fly from the roof of her building, her Tar Beach, past the Union building, her dad’s construction job, and to the ice cream factory she dreams of owning. One important theme undertoning this book is race. At one point as Cassie Louise flies over the union building she mentions that her dad is unable to join “because Grandpa wasn’t a member.” Her grandfather wasn’t a member because he was black. She continues by saying that it doesn’t matter because some day her dad is “going to own that building…Then it won’t matter that he’s...colored or a half-breed Indian, like they say.” The beautiful urban paintings, and the inspiring words of Cassie Louise to dream and fly, and overcome racism and what they say, are a few reasons why I found this to be a great children’s book.

Rodman, Mary Ann. First Grade Stinks!. Atlanta: PeachTree Publishers, 2006. Print.

                First Grade Stinks is the story of a very opinionated young girls’ first day of first grade. Haley and her good friend Ryan start the day excited that they are no longer little kindergarteners, but soon Haley finds herself missing Kindergarten and not liking first grade one bit. By the end of the day, Haley loves first grade, and is very glad to no longer be a little kid. The story, told from Haley’s point of view does a superb job of portraying all the mixed emotions of excited, fear, anxiety, pride, sadness, and joy that a young child feels on the first day of school, or at the start of anything new. I was thinking about how this would be a great book to read on the first day of school. Some activities I would do with the book to help my students try to reach higher level thinking, and feel a deeper connection with the book would be to ask my students to all share something that they liked and did not like about their previous school year, and something that they are excited about, and scared about/dreading about the new year. We would write all these ideas that they come up with on a poster board at the front of the class. Another activity I thought would be neat to do to help the students connect more deeply with the text would be to have them draw a picture of themselves in their class from last year, and then to draw another one for this year. Activities like these I think are very important because they challenge students to engage with the books they are reading.

Potter, Beatrix. The Tale of Peter Rabbit. New York: SeaStar Books, 2001. Print.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit is an old classic tale first published in England in 1902. Peter, as the author Beatrix Potter puts it, is “a naughty rabbit”, who does not listen to his mother but goes into farmer McGregor’s garden where he is given quite a scare, and despite escaping gets very ill after he returns home, and is not able to enjoy the meal of bread, milk, and blackberries that his other more obedient siblings get that night. This book reminds me a lot of the Hans Christian Anderson tales we read the first week of class. The story centers around the animal world, and the characters teach a moral lesson. In the case of Peter Rabbit the lesson is to listen to your mother, when Peter disobeys her he is scared, put in danger, and eventually gets sick and misses out on the yummy dinner his other siblings get to eat. Instead, he is in bed with nothing but tea. I find it very interesting how Michael Hughes’ illustrations reinforce this idea. On page 3 Peter and his siblings are pictured with their mother. Peter has his clothes unbuttoned, and is off to the side by himself, while his three siblings are all very well dressed, very proper and neat and orderly. Again, a few of the illustrations in the garden show Peter with his clothes unbuttoned, and a somewhat mischievous look on his face.

Parr, Todd. We Belong Together. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2007. Print

In his book, We Belong Together, Todd Parr shares what he thinks it means for a family to belong together. In his own description he says it is “a book about Adoption and Families”. Mr. Parr in a simple, childlike way describes how the needs of a child can be met by the care of parents. What I love about the book is how the illustrations work together with the text in a pattern. The pattern is first there will be a picture of the child alone, and the parents saying to the child, “We belong together because…” of some need the child has, the next page shows the parents without the child saying, basically, “(We can meet that need)”, and the following pages show parents and child together and the text saying “Now, (we can do this together).” For example: “We belong together because you wanted to learn,/ and we had lots to teach you./ Now we can discover new places together.” I think this book would be great for orphanages, children in foster homes, and any couple considering adoption. My wife and I love this book, and yes, we hope to adopt someday. Mr. Parr teaches that a family does not have to look alike, or even be related, they just have to love each other, and live life together.

Numeroff, Laura Joffe. If You Give a Moose a Muffin. New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 1991. Print.

If You Give a Moose a Muffin, is the fun sequel to If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. In the book a little boy shares a muffin with a moose, who then asks for jam, who then asks for more muffins, who then asks that they make more, who then asks to borrow a sweater, who then asks to sew, who then asks for old socks to make puppets, who then asks… One very interesting thing about this book is that while it was published in the same year as Tar Beach, it is quite the opposite kind of family. While Tar Beach was about a black family in an urban setting, the family in Moose is white, blonde haired, and lives in a house by the woods. While Tar Beach and Moose were both published in 1991, one displaying an all-black family, and the other all-white, in contrast the two books I have published in the 2000’s, First Grade Stinks and We Belong Together both have multi-racial characters. In First Grade, the main character is black, her best friend is white, and their teacher is Asian, while in Belong Together the characters are all different colors, blue, white, green, orange, yellow, black, purple etc. I wonder if this is a trend that is true on a large scale for children’s literature, that is the presence of more interracial characters in books in the 2000’s? It seems to me that that is what has happened in television cartoons for kids, where there are minority characters like Dora the Explorer who have gained a lot of popularity over the last decade.