It’s been more than a decade since I’ve had a picture book and so I’m thrilled to announce that Big Truck Day! is coming in 2022. It’s a romp of a story celebrating a Big Truck Day like the ones the Beaverton City Library hosted when my kids were young. It’s an homage to community workers and the importance of library access for everybody.
I’m thrilled to be paired with debut illustrator Niki Stage for this project. Her art is sweet, joyful, and energetic. Just the vibe I was hoping for.
When I was in grade school in the late 70s, I had a friend who, like debut author Waka T Brown, traveled to Japan to stay with grandparents regularly in order to keep his language skills current and connection to his culture fresh. I remember his complex feelings about the whole thing. Pride in his culture and love for his grandparents who seemed fiercely strict to me. But sadness at missing summer camp with his scout troop. I remember that kids teased him about his proficiency in martial arts. (This was before the movie Karate Kid made martial arts popular.) But I also remember how impressed we all were by his fluency in Japanese and the way he drew kanji with a brush pen. I loved how While I Was Away by Waka T Brown captured all the beautiful complexity of being a bicultural kid moving between Kansas and Japan and finding things to love in both places. The fastest growing group of children in America are biracial, bilingual, and bicultural kids. I’m always happy to find a book that celebrates them. The publisher is Quill Tree Books an imprint of HarperCollins.
One of my favorite things about historical fiction is the window they provide into seldom studied chapters in history. Letters from Cuba by Ruth Behar is an epistalory novel about a Jewish refugee putting down roots in Cuba while working to bring the rest of her family out of Poland during the horrors of the Second World War. Twelve year old Ester narrates her new and mostly welcoming life in Cuba in letters to the sister she left behind. It is based on the author’s own family story. It won a 2020 Pura Belpré Award and is from Nancy Paulson Books at Penguin Random House.
I have seldom read a chapter book as emotionally true as Maybe Maybe Marisol Rainey. Our hero is the delightfully cautious and introspective Marisol, a Philippine -American girl living in Louisiana. The two things I appreciated most about this book was the main characters disarming honesty about her many fears, and her steadfast best friend Jada. So many middle grade books address the problem of the mean, snarky, bullying girl. It’s easy to forget that children–even girls–are as capable of kindness as they are of cruelty. I loved Jada’s unquestioning acceptance of Marisol’s many quirks. I loved their imaginative play and the hilarious names they gave to household appliances. And I loved Marisol’s unwavering faith in her friend. I also appreciated the leisurely pace of the story, which meandered from one summer activity to the next while Marisol thoughtfully addressed her fear of climbing the magnolia tree in her back yard. This is a perfect choice for a tender-hearted reader.
This is the second in the new chapter book series featuring Ryan Hart. I admit I am especially fond of this series because it is set in Portland OR, my hometown and features favorite places from my own childhood including the Saturday Market, Oaks Park, and my beloved county libraries. I also very much appreciated how the faith of Ryan Hart’s family is depicted in the moral lessons they impart and the summer bible camp she and her brother attend. Ryan spends a summer preparing for the birth of her baby sister and adjusting to all the changes that entails from doing more chores to choosing a name. This series is longer and more complex than some chapter books making it best for 6 to 10 year olds–a good companion for readers of Clementine, and Ramona.
And now a personal aside. The majority of children of all races in this country are religiously observant. The entire culture of worship, vacation bible school and summer camp, church based sports teams and scout troops, social justice activities, youth groups, rites of passage, and sacraments, all of it, gets left out of children’s books and there’s absolutely no reason for it. Even in conversations specifically about diversity we seldom include religion and that’s a blind spot that could use some attention.