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Adventure Annie goes to Kindergarten’ by Toni Buzeo
Annie Grace starts her day with her mom who helps her get ready and takes her to her first day of Kindergarten where Annie tries to create adventures for herself because, after all, Annie Grace is Adventure Annie. She gets into all sorts of trouble around the classroom and school as she single-mindedly tries to find an “adventure”. Eventually, the two quiet, obedient students who her teacher sends to get the milk for snack time get lost and Annie gets her adventure. Mr. Todd charges her with the task of going to find the “milk getters” who are lost. And sure enough, with the help of the walkie talkies that she packed in her adventure toolkit, she finds her classmates and the milk, and brings the wagon of milk back to the class. So, Annie the Adventurer gets to be a super heroine and in the end she is in her mom’s arms with a hug and a smile. Although the story was a little banal and repetitive, Adventure Annie is clearly being raised by a single mom and she’s having a rip-roaring time being herself.
Recommendation: Unenthusiastically Recommended; Ages: 4+
Book Reviewer: Omilaju Miranda
A Father Like That by Charlotte Zolotow
So just bowl me over and break my heart. This narrative comes from celebrated author Charlotte Zolotow who recently passed away. Books like this of hers make us thankful for the stories she gave us before moving to the next life, while we feel the void left in the future children’s literary canon. With the direct, “I wish I had a father,” Zolotow opens up this first person narrative with the painful yearning of her protagonist’s existence. In the conversation with his mother that follows, we see how a child missing a parent imagines a full and complex icon of love for himself and his mother. His pining for a father has moved him to think of every aspect of how a father would treat him and communicate with him, including the way that father would smooth things over with mom and speak in a low voice when angry. An insightful rendering of the depth and breadth of a child’s understanding of the nuances of human relationships, the book gives all single parents a role model in the mother who is just as powerfully evocative. In her one line, she responds with sensitivity to her son’s description of a father, embracing that that type of father sounds wonderful and offers the empowering suggestion that if that father never comes, the protagonist can be that type of father himself one day. Blow me away—this picture book has delivered the best response to a child wanting an absent parent that I’ve heard in a long time. LeUyen Pham’s illustrations pull us in and hold us close to the family of this child’s imagination and secure our emotional connection with mother and son at the end. The narrative is very intimate and feels targeted to the community it specifically represents.
Recommendation: Highly Recommended; ages 6+
Reviewer: Omilaju Miranda
I Love You Like Crazy Cakes by Rose Lewis
A sincere letter from a Euro-American adoptive mother to her adopted Chinese daughter, this is the first person story of the transcontinental infant/toddler adoption from the mother’s perspective. The language is sensitive and sincere as the mother tells her daughter about their lives before they lived together and their first few days together. Children will enjoy reading about a plane ride, feeling as if they traveled to a mysterious orphanage in China where every baby has a friend in their crib, and a magical connection between mother and child from the first moment they met. My heart warmed at the conscientious, emotional connection the adoptive mother voices, “I held you…and cried. The tears were for your Chinese mother, who could not keep you.” I believe many adoptive parents must feel a connection to the loss birth parents feel or may feel at releasing their child for adoption but this is the first time I’ve seen it on the page in a picture book. For many parents who have trouble expressing that dimension of their feelings to their child, the mother in this book can be their voice. Overall, I am impressed by way the delicate, watercolor illustrations show the adoptive mother’s dedication to integrating China into her daughter’s life. A joy to read.
Recommendation: Recommended; Ages 2+
Book Reviewer: Omilaju Miranda
TV movie “A Country Christmas Story”
At the outset, this is the story of a small-town, white Appalachian mother and her “brown-skinned biracial” daughter who are living heartbreakingly poor lives in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee three years after a divorce. The emotionally and economically burdened mother is inflexible in her demand that her daughter commit to math while the daughter wants nothing more than to sing and play guitar like her absent father. When the father returns, both parents think a black girl singing country music is a joke but Grace, (who reminds her parents that she is both black and white) and Grace’s teacher have set as their goal Grace winning Dolly Parton’s Teen Country Star of Tomorrow Contest. Grace and her teacher gain confidence by educating themselves and her parents on the history of blacks and interracial alliances in Country Music. But race relation history takes up less than five minutes of this T.V. movie.
The emotional pull of the story is multi-layered as three generations of mothers and daughters find themselves torn over the demons of their pasts of insecurity and self-doubt vs. their emotional freedom to support Gracie in pursuing her dream. Added conflict comes in the form of the feelings every family member and people in the town have about the father, Danny, who most think abandoned the family; the truth is much more depthful and contoured than a simple abandonment story. I’ll leave it at that since I don’t want to post any spoilers. The father is refreshingly more emotionally complex than a stock, machismo black man; the social spheres of these characters’ lives are filled with people invested in the characters and not the societal issues that influence their world. Even though Dolly Parton and NBC have shined a light on the existence of blacks and mixed people in an oft-forgotten part of the United States –Appalachia, this is a story about a girl’s family and small, country community supporting her as she follows her heart and the music on a path of family unity. I missed the original airing of this movie on NBC but I downloaded it for $0.99 from Amazon.com last night and, since it moved me to tears with great writing for t.v., unexpected plot twists and well developed characters who work their way through all sorts of complex mistakes—you should see this moving story.
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Reviewer: Omilaju Miranda
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