Showing posts with label #MultiRacial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #MultiRacial. Show all posts

#IMWAYR March 10, 2025

Welcome! It's #IMWAYR time again, when bloggers share what they have been reading and find out what others have been up to. Kathryn hosts the adult version of this meme at Book Date. Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers host the kidlit rendition. I'm also connecting up with the Sunday Salon. These are fabulous places to start your search for what to read next.


Some day I will write reviews of books as soon as I finish reading them, or at the very least, make notes, but the truth is, I don't. If I had done this the week before last, the unexpected visit from my grandkids wouldn't have interfered with getting in a blog post. I didn't though, and so when I had to choose between writing or spending time with my darling ones, it was a no brainer. 

We probably read more picture books than the one's I'm sharing here, but I can't remember them if we did.

After they left to go home I finished this little wall hanging/placemat for the youngest one who is mad about capybaras these days. The pattern is designed by Kimberley Arnold. The background is more blue green than it appears here.


Titles with a 🍁 indicate this is a Canadian or Indigenous Canadian Author and or Illustrator.
Clicking on the title will take you to the Goodreads page of the book

PREVIOUS BLOG POST

PICTURE BOOKS

5 stars

Knight Owl and Early Bird by Christopher Denise (October 15, 2024)

Early Bird might not be able to guard the castle during the night, but that doesn't mean, they don't have many other talents.
This book is a celebration of individual differences and strengths. At the same time, in the end, it's also about the power of many. 
Be warned that this tale can get pretty scary. My seven year old granddaughter was terrified, even though I reminded her it would have a happy ending. 

This is an alphabet book showing creatures that are a combination of two different animals.  The illustrations are delightfully imaginative. It is, ultimately, a book that highlights and celebrates mixed race identity. The author is of European and Japanese descent. 

3.5 stars

Nori and His Delicious Dreams by Jeff Chiba Stearns March 1, 2020 🍁

Nori goes to bed each night dreaming of sleeping with food. What I liked most about this book is that it takes the reader on a multicultural culinary journey. A double page spread in the back of the book explains where all the dishes come from.

My grandkids brought these Jeff Chiba Stearns books with them last weekend. They were excited to share them with me. It's a testimony to the power of having author visits. Ada, the eldest of the girls, arranged to have these two signed for her younger sister. 

Jeff Chiba Stearns is an animator as well as an author. I hope you make time for, and enjoy his animated memoir here. 

   


Elise Gravel is a Canadian treasure. She writes fabulous books, both fiction and nonfiction, for the younger crowd. This is one of them. In here, her charming little little monsters explain quite brilliantly the basics of how our brains work. 


This is a book that would work well as an introduction to a more in depth conversation about gender expectations, stereotypes, and social justice. 

This book won the Andre Norton Award in 2011.
Amid a climate of suspicion and prejudice, Tiffany, now fifteen, is fully immersed in her role as witch of the chalk. It turns out that the Cunning Man, a demonic spirit, is spreading hatred of witches in general, and is coming for Tiffany in particular. Even when she identifies who is responsible, and learns how it all began, it doesn't stop the monster. In the end, Tiffany, like many witches before her, has to figure out how to deal with him herself.
I loved that Eskarina Smith, the witch/wizard from Equal Rites, shows up to offer her guidance.
I appreciate that Pratchett shows us how rumour, hatred, racism and bigotry work in our world. While I value the importance of an individual speaking up, I wish that he had shown a group of individuals working together to overcome this evil, instead of the trope of the lone heroine saving the day. Tiffany might have had only one Cunning Man to deal with, but there are many Cunning Men stoking hatred and division among us today. It is going to take a massive amount of collective effort to defeat it.


Listening to this felt like immersing myself in a dream. It has a mythic quality. The characters are like fleshed out archetypes living a world of magical realism.  
It's a book about relationships, connections and love. It begins with the ill fated romance and marriage of teens, Kismet Poe and Gary Geist, and Kismet's relationship with the brilliant Hugo. We see what love looks like over time through both their parent's partnerships. Because it is also about connections, it's less about romantic love than it is about mother and daughter love, love for family, love for community and love for the land. I suppose it might sound strange given that it seems to focus on the ill fated marriage, yet the marriage feels like a kind of catalyst. It's through that union that we come to understand and connect with the other characters and their motivations. 
It's also a book about tragedy and trauma and how all these people cope with it. 

YA NON FICTION


Like Medicine Wheel for the Planet by Jennifer Grenz, a book I talked about a few weeks ago, this book is all about forging a new kind of relationship with the natural world.
Our world needs this kind of perspective now more than ever. 

CURRENTLY 

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst July 9, 2024

Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters by Marlene Zuk August 9, 2022

UP NEXT (MAYBE)

Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew 🍁

2025 READING GOALS

#MustRead2025 9/25

NonFiction 11/30 

Poetry 1/12 

Canadian Authors 19/50

Indigenous Authors 6/25

Goodreads Reading Challenge: 38/200


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#IMWAYR February 5th, 2024

Welcome! It's #IMWAYR time again, when bloggers share what they have been reading and find out what others have been up to. Kathryn hosts the adult version of this meme at Book Date. Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers host the kidlit rendition. These are fabulous places to start your search for what to read next.

Last Monday my specialist put me on antibiotics to treat my sinus infection. I've got another week to go. If you've ever had one of these, you know how hard they are to treat. He is sending me off for a scan to see what is going on in there before he repairs the damage done when I broke my nose in 2020. 

I did manage to work for 1 1/2 days last week although I was completely done in afterwards. 

In my creative life, I'm continuing to work on a knitted sweater for my son. I've also  been trying to finish up an order I took for two mice. I've finished up the clothing she wanted, and even though she didn't ask for it, am attempting to make shoes for them. It is really finicky given that the mice feet are at most, one inch long. I will make sure to share a picture of them when I am done.
 
Titles with a 🍁 indicate this is a Canadian or Indigenous Canadian Author and or Illustrator.
Clicking on the title will take you to the Goodreads page of the book.


NON FICTION PICTURE BOOKS

4 stars

Crayfish by Lola M. Schaefer January 1, 2002

I was subbing for one of the local teacher librarians last week. She asked me to read a couple of books to the primary groups who would be coming in. 
When I came upon this book, I knew it would be one of them. When I was a girl growing up in this area, there were lots of crayfish (crawdads) in the river and other bodies of water. I haven't seen any in many years, but that might be just because I'm not looking for them. 
This is "a basic introduction to crayfish, focusing on their physical characteristics, habitat, diet, and activities." I wish there had been more about how their eggs are fertilized.
It is a wonderful nonfiction title for beginning readers from prek to grade 2. I appreciate that it has all kinds of important nonfiction text features: labeled photographs, a table of contents, a glossary, an index.

This is the other book I read to those groups of primary students. If I had read it before, I didn't remember it although I did recall that it is a great read. 
It's a take on children wanting to keep wild animals for pets. In this case, a bear finds a boy in the bushes and convinces his mother to let him keep it as a pet. Like all the other Peter Brown books I've read, the art is charming, it's loaded with humour, and reveals an important lesson. 


When I first finished this, I was left pondering VR (virtual reality). Part of me worried that spending time in VR is a way to avoid reality and thus, not trying to change negative aspects of it. However, as I reflected more on the book, I realized that in many ways spending time in VR is a lot like reading. Yes it has an escapist component, but sometimes, that's what you need. It's also a way to learn more about yourself and the world around you. Perhaps if we could spend time in an artificial world, we would be able to come back more aware of what is missing and be motivated to change our lives.
This is in essence, what this book is about.
Addie (named after a toirtoise) and her father travel across the country for his summer job, teaching university students working with VR. Her mother, for reasons that are not clear at first, is unable to come with them. After a rocky start, she ends up becoming friends with Mateo, a boy across the hall. The two of them come up with ways to use VR to help patients in the hospital where Mateo volunteers.
There is a lot going on in this book. At the same time as we learn about VR, we learn about space travel, the longest living tortoise, opiate addiction, death, grief, and forgiveness.
I really appreciated the diversity of the characters and the authenticity of the relationships between them.

ADULT/YA FICTION


This is a sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow. In the first book we learn that something has destroyed the electrical grid, the world has gone dark, and is experiencing an apocalypse. A small Anishinaabe community in the north, after dealing with destructive outsiders and the deaths of many of it's members during the first winter, has survived.
The remaining people decide that in order to survive they will need to move to where there are better food sources. A group of six set off south to find out if they will be able to return to their original territory on one of the great lakes. Their journey is fraught with all kinds of dangers. Some come from the land itself and others from the humans they run into on their journey. Not all of them make it. 
A couple of times I became so terrified for these characters that I had to skip forward in sections of my audiobook. 

ADULT/YA NONFICTION

It's a paradigm shift that takes a deep look into the evolution of our species from the perspective of women's biological needs and the role they play in society. It examines the intersection of biology, sex, gender, culture, and evolution.
The writing is brilliant - full of scientific information, but also cosy and intimate, like when she refers to a Morganucodon, a rodent that lived 200m years ago in the Jurassic period, as Morgie.
She's going to piss a lot of people off with some of her thinking, like the fact that trans women are really women, but who really cares.
Everyone should be paying close attention to the chapters on love, especially with regards to the nutritional needs of girls and women.

I'm really looking forward to talking to my book club about this book. Charlotte Gill writes about her life as the child of an English mother and Sikh father.
The book is both personal, and global. It addresses the reality of racism at both micro and macro levels. On the one hand it's an exploration of a family trying to navigate their way through the remnants of two worlds, and fit into a third. It's a tale of family and relationship dissolution. In the end it's about forgiveness.
It's also examines the impact of systemic racism in our cultural institutions and what that is like at a personal level. She writes about her experience of being half brown, of being a member of the diaspora and not really fitting in anywhere and of dealing with racist experiences associated with her skin colour.

CURRENTLY

Bad Actors by Mick Herron May 2022
The Librarian of Auschwitz (Graphic Novel Version) by Antonio Iturbe, Salva Rubio (Adaptation), Lilit Zekulin Thwaites (translator) & Loreto Aroco (Illustrator) January 2023
Things in the Basement by Ben Hatke August 29, 2023

UP NEXT (MAYBE)

Of Manners and Murder by Anastasia Hastings February 7, 2023
The Faint of Heart by Kerilynn Wilson June 13, 2023
Stazy and the Magic List by Nancy Hundal October 15, 2023  🍁

January Reading Update: 

I read 16 books (3569 pages)

graphic novels 3
picture books 2
nonfiction picture books 2
middle grade novels 4
YA/adult novels 3
YA/adult nonfiction 2
BIPOC authors 7

READING GOALS 

#MustRead2024 3/25 one on the go

NonFiction 4 

Canadian Authors 5/50

Indigenous Authors 2/25 

Goodreads Reading Challenge: 19/200 
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Beautiful You, Beautiful Me by Tasha Spillett-Sumner & Salini Perera (Illustrator)


Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this beautiful picture book. It was released October 18, 2022, by Owl Books.

Your library needs this book. Every library needs this book. 

Izzy has a warm and loving relationship with her mother. Then she starts to realize that they don't match. They have different physical attributes: different skin colours and different hair. Izzy wants to be "Mama's kind of beautiful." Each time she says something to her mother about it, her mother points out that,

"You're part of me
and I'm part of you.

I'm beautiful like me
and you're beautiful like you."

It's a gorgeous refrain that is repeated across the book.

When they take a walk outside, they see that in the animal world, babies and mothers do not look the same.

In the end when Izzy's mother notes that they have different eye colour, it's Izzy who repeats the refrain.



I love the story line here. That refrain works for all parents and children, even if they look the same. Still, it's even more profound knowing that this story of a "multiracial child navigating identity and belonging draws from author Tasha Spillett-Sumner's own experience growing up as an Afro-Indigenous girl."

Selina Perera's illustrations are full of bright colour and tenderness. You can check out more of her work here.

I couldn't help but make a connection to this book since I have multiracial grandchildren who are half Korean. In my case, my granddaughters don't really look like their father. Still the refrain works for them too. I can't wait to read this book to them. I'll let you know what they think later.

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