alibrarymama

Today is Multicultural Children’s Book Day, started by Mia Wenjen of Pragmatic Mom and Valarie Budayr of JumpIntoaBook.com. I am super excited to be part of the blogger team supporting this!  I have been watching this great event grow over the last couple of years.  Just a few things to share from them before the book review.

First, there is a *free* downloadable classroom kindness kit – check it out here!

Tonight, there will be a big Twitter party where you can win bundles of diverse children’s literature.

And there is a free downloadable ebook from Amazon about Multicultural Children’s Book Day.

And now on the review!

Author Jill Diamond was kind enough to send me a copy of her book, Lou Lou and Pea and the Mural Mystery to review for Multicultural Children’s Book Day.

Lou Lou and Pea and the Mural Mystery by Jill Diamond. Pictures by Lesley Vamos. Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2016.

LouLou Bombay and her best friend Pea Pearl have their Friday afternoon PSPP tea party – Post-School Pre-Parent.  After tea, they walk through their neighborhood and decide whether they’d rather go buy a cupcake or visit the friendly owner of the candle shop.  But their usual weekend routine is interrupted when LouLou finds that her prize camellia has been killed just days before she enters a garden competition.  She is distraught and determined to find the culprit.  Soon, she and Pea find that others in their neighborhood are having things go wrong as well – a missing pet rabbit here, a vandalized craft display there – and all of the disasters are being painted into the many murals around town.  Are they memorials or bragging? The adults don’t seem to notice, and even Pea isn’t as suspicious as LouLou of the oddly behaved boy who’s just appeared in the house next door.  But all the neighborhood preparations for Dia de los Muertos should give them some good cover for figuring out exactly what’s going on.  The neighborhood in general and Pea’s family in particular are Latinix, and there are lots of Spanish phrases used throughout the book, with a glossary and recipe and craft ideas related to Dia de los Muertos in the back.

This is a super-appealing book – everyone who saw it while I was reading it wanted to find out more about it.  I really liked the depiction of a close-knit, happy city neighborhood  with a coziness usually reserved for small towns.  It’s written in a very descriptive style, with lots of adjectives and alliterations, features which I would have loved as a kid.  The cartoon-like illustrations from Lesley Vamos add a lot.  It was a fun mystery, and I liked that LouLou’s first suspicions were absolutely off base.  However, I had some serious reservations about the way things played out.  I think it’s entirely natural that LouLou would be celebrating Dia de los Muertos even though that’s not her heritage because of her best friend and the neighborhood she lives in.  But taking over an altar previously dedicated to Pea’s deceased aunt and using it to remember LouLou’s dead flower seemed downright insensitive, no matter how much LouLou loved her flower.  Adding some camellias to the existing altar would have been more appropriate. I also felt that Pea had some issues, besides the unfortunate name – Pea (short for Peacock) is cute in print, but lends itself too easily to playground cruelty.  She just didn’t feel like as fully developed a character as LouLou, and while we need more diverse characters of all kinds, she felt more like a sidekick than an equal partner here.  All in all, while this book had a few too many problems for me to love it, it’s a start that could be very well developed in future books.

Here are some other multicultural mysteries:

• Eddie Red Undercover: Mystery on Museum Mile by Marcia Wells
• Greenglass House by Kate Milford
• Murder is Bad Manners: A Wells & Wong Mystery by Robin Stevens
• The Mystery of Meerkat Hill: A Precious Ramotswe Mystery for Young Readers by Alexander McCall Smith

Betsy Bird at a Fuse #8 Production was excited about the Museum Mysteries early chapter book series by Steve Brezenoff, which begins with The Case of the Haunted History Museum, though I still need to track them down.  Mia at Pragmatic Mom has an even longer list!

Be sure to head back to the MCBD site for the big linky of everything else going on today!

Graphic novels are top on my kids’ lists of books they want to read, and I usually struggle to keep up with them.  Here are four we all enjoyed in the past few months – two of which turned out to be Cybils Elementary/Middle Grade Graphic Novel finalists.

Mighty Jack by Ben Hatke. First Second, 2016.
This latest from favorite Hatke (Zita the Space Girl, Nobody Likes a Goblin) clearly starts as a take on Jack and the Beanstalk, but goes off in wild directions.  The story opens with a close up on a kitchen counter piled with unpaid bills covered in red ink.  Jack’s mother is working two jobs and still not quite able to make ends meet, while leaving Jack in charge of his nearly wordless younger sister Maddy.  She’s quite persuasive anyway, and, while at a flea market with their mother, convinces Jack to pay for a chest of seeds that the shady-looking merchant claims are magical.  Short on money, Jack ends up paying with their mother’s car.  That’s only the very beginning of trouble, as the seeds grow into a garden of monsters, which Jack and Maddy battle with help from homeschooled and sword-wielding Lilly from down the road.  I’m pretty sure that Lilly, like Zita, is modelled after one of Hatke’s daughters, and there are also cameo appearances from other Hatke characters, including the shady merchant and the mechanically minded girl from Little Robot.  This is a fast, fun ride, with gentle treatment of serious issues like poverty and Maddy’s never-named mental/social issues.  While all the characters are white, I’m feeling OK with showing poverty especially as something that doesn’t only affect people of color. Warning: this story stops right in the middle of an important arc.  Still, it made this year’s Cybils Finalists for a reason!  Continue reading →

What an interesting prompt from the busy minds behind The Broke and the Bookish for this week’s Top 10 Tuesday!

While just about everyone on my gift list gets books from me, I rarely buy books for myself.  It has to be a book I’ll want to go back to multiple times, loan out to friends, or am unable to get from the library before I’ll buy it.  That being said, I love getting books as presents myself!  Christmas just doesn’t feel right unless I have a new book to curl up with afterword.  Here are some:

The Birchbark House series by Louise Erdrich – both my children and I love these books, and I can easily see us going back to them many times.

Camelot’s Blood by Sarah Zettel – this falls in the series completion – this is the last book in this lovely Arthurian romance series, only published in the UK even though the author lives in my home town.  (here’s my review of Book 2, For Camelot’s Honor) I bought the ebook once, but it’s since vanished off all my devices.

The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater – Need I explain?  I have two of the books in this series, but not enough to fill the series wrapper I got at the book signing this year.

A Face like Glass by Frances Hardinge – another UK only edition.

Heroine Complex by Sarah Kuhn – this is an awesome-looking book that I will ask my library to buy if no one gets it for me.

The Merlin Conspiracy by Diana Wynne Jones – I’m slowly building a DWJ collection of my own.  I won the companion book to this, Deep Secret, from Brandy at Random Musings of a Bibliophile last year.  I’m reading this aloud to my son right now, but I know we won’t finish before the library copy is due.  Plus, I love the UK covers! (Brandy points out the Dalemark Quartet is just out with new covers, too…)

The Opinionated Knitter by Elizabeth Zimmerman – knitting books are some of my favorites, as they’re easy to go back to and flip through.  This is a classic for a reason – Zimmerman is both extremely knowledgeable and hilarious.

Stories Julian Tells by Ann Cameron and Ann Strugnell – this collection of beautifully poetic linked short stories is one I’d love to have on hand, especially to loan to teachers for class read-alouds.

The Touchstone Series by Andrea K. Höst – I’ve mentioned wanting to read her before, I think, and self-published books are still a hard sell in libraries.

When the Sea Turned to Silver by Grace Lin – another series-completing book!  I have the other two and would love to own this one as well.

What books or bookish things are you hoping to get?