Ann has stayed at her friends house too long and now must walk home in the dark.  Using her wild imagination, all the odd shapes are very hairy scary animals and monsters.  The text rhymes and repeats so it’s easy for the boys to follow and to anticipate what’s next.   They loved to turn the page to see what was the very hairy scary thing on the next page.  I even heard my little four year old talking to himself in the bathroom mirror repeating the lines from this book.

It was a pleasure to read this book out loud because of the rhyming and repeating text.  We got pretty loud when we yelled out BAT, SPIDER, LION, SKUNK!  I personally, did not like the style of the illustrations at all.  I think the book could have gone up another notch with better illustrations and would have me wanting to add this to my permanent collection.  But as is, my boys enjoyed this one so much that we will continue to read it from the library until Halloween (although I wouldn’t consider this one strictly a Halloween book).

And as a side note, Rick Walton is prolific local Utah picture book writer.  We have his book Bullfrog Pops which is just adorable.

Links of interest:  Rick Walton’s website, more book blogger reviews.
Genre: Fiction picture book, approx ages 4-8.
Publisher: Putnam Juvenile. August 19, 2004.
Hardcover, 32 pages. ISBN 0399238581
A Very Hairy Scary Story is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon.

Copyright 2010. Maw Books Blog

Maw Books has an affiliate relationship with several bookstores, including Indiebound, Powell’s, and Amazon . When you buy a product (not just books – any product), via one of my links, Maw Books earns income from the sale and as always, it’s much appreciated as all affiliate income is used to support the blog. There is no cost to you.

In The Heaven Shop, which takes place in Malawi, Binti is very proud.  She’s thirteen and already has a “real” job acting on a show called Gogo’s Family on the radio.  Her role is popular and she always makes sure that when she walks home everybody can see the script.  Her father runs a coffin shop called The Heaven Shop, which is always busy because of many AIDS deaths.  But slowly it becomes more and more difficult for him to run because he spends more and more time in bed.  Soon Binti, her brother and sister are planning their own father’s funeral.

From the book jacket:

At her father’s funeral, Binti’s grandmother says the words that no one in Malawi wants to hear.  Binti’s father, and her mother before him, died of AIDS.  Binti, her sister and brother are split up and sent to the homes of relatives who can barely tolerate their presence.  Ostracized by their extended family, the orphans are treated like the lowest servents.  With her brother far away and her sister wallowing in her own sorrow, Binti can hardly contain her rage.  She, Binti Phiri, was the child star of a popular radio program.  Now she is scraping to survive.  Binti always believed she was special.  Now she is nothing but a common AIDS orphan.

Binti Phiri is not about to give up.  Even as she clings to hope that her former life will be restored, she must face the greatest challenge.  If she and her brother and sister are ever to be together again, Binti Phiri will have to look outside herself and find a new way to be special.

The Heaven Shop is a great introduction for children to learn about AIDS and it’s effects upon the many orphaned children in Africa.  The author’s note at the end of the book gives a brief but great summary of AIDS in Africa.  According to it, more than thirteen million children in Sub-Saharan Africa have lost their parents to AIDS.  The number of these “AIDS orphans” is expected to double by 2010 (next year!).  AIDS spreads among when when they are raped, forced into prostitution, governments spend health care and eduction dollars on weapons and soldiers.  Poverty also spreads AIDS when basic nutrition and medicine are beyond the reach of many.  As Deborah Ellis says, “We may not have a cure for AIDS and HIV – yet.  But we can take action to prevent war and alleviate poverty.

Binti’s journey is one that you’ll want to take.  I loved watching her transformation from a proud, selfish child, being humbled as a orphan, and rising above her circumstances to help those around her.  I highly recommend The Heaven Shop for great insight on such a troubling subject.

The book also includes an interview with the author.  Royalties from The Heaven Shop will be donated to Unicef.

Yankee Girl was inspired by Mary Ann Rodman’s own childhood, who like the main character lived in Jackson, Mississippi during the height of the civil rights movement.  Alice is the daughter of a FBI agent and when the civil rights movement down south excalates, Alice and her family move from Chicago to Mississippi.  They are placed smack dab in the middle of a culture that they don’t understand, nor does she understand why people treat blacks differently. To make matters worse, Alice doesn’t fit in at school because she’s a Yankee.  She knows what it feels like to be the one that’s different.

Alice soon discovers that she’s not the only one in need of a friend when Valerie Taylor joins her sixth grade class – the first of two black students at her new school as a result of a mandatory integration law.  Valerie doesn’t want to be there as much as everybody else but her father is a high profile civil rights leader who travels with Martin Luther King.  Alice is torn between the prospect of befriending Valerie or harassing her so she can fit in with the popular girls.  This story gives an awesome narrative of the dangers of racist motivations and the consequences for following the crowd instead of your heart at a time when it matters most.

Mary Ann Rodman is quickly becoming one of my favorite children’s authors this year.  Yankee Girl was a wonderful book and I highly recommend it, as well as Jimmy’s Stars.  Both are great historical fiction novels!  I’m now off to read My Best Friend and will anticipate anything that she publishes in the future (which she can tell you about that here).

Mud City by Deborah Ellis

In Mud City, I expected the story to be about Parvana’s experiences in a refugee camp. I was completely surprised when instead the story was about Shauzia, Parvana’s best friend with whom we are introduced in the first book. In fact, Parvana isn’t even in this book. I have never heard of an author changing the main character in a series before. Has this been done? I thought it was really strange. Since I had become so attached to Parvana, I really did want to hear the rest of her story. If Deborah Ellis wanted to share Shazia’s story, I only wish that it would have been done by Parvana and Shauzia reconnecting. Having said that, I still really liked this book.

We find fourteen year old Shauzia and her dog Jasper in a refugee camp in Pakistan having left her miserable life in Kabul, Afghanistan behind. She carries with her a magazine cutout of a field of lavender flowers and dreams of one day visiting France and seeing the ocean. She decides that the only way to make her dream come true is to leave the refugee camp and instead earn money on the streets. Living on the streets is dangerous, scary, adventurous, and she even spends a night at the local jail. She discovers that navigating her way through a country full of Afghan refugees is not easy and that her dream of escaping her miserable life may well be out of her hands.

To tell you the truth, I was sad to have this series come to an end. Deborah Ellis was a wonderful storyteller who sheds light on the plight of children in war-torn countries particularly Afghanistan and Pakistan. Another book of hers that I would like to read is Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak. I discovered this one listed at the back of Tasting the Sky, A Palestinian Childhood by Ibtisam Barakat which I also just finished.

I knew I had to read Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata after seeing it recently floating around in the blogosphere. Plus it won the 2005 Newbery Medal and one of my “life reading goals” is to read all the Newbery’s. Plus, on top of that I’ve always enjoyed any stories with an Asian flair. Plus, on top of the top, I loved the book cover. Absolutely intriguing.

My uncle was exactly one inch taller than my father. But his stomach was soft. We knew this because we hit him in it once the year before, and he yelped in pain and threatened to spank us. We got sent to bed without supper because my parents said hitting someone was the worst thing you could do. Stealing was second, and lying was third.
Before I was twelve, I would have committed all three of those crimes.

Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? And yes, I’m aware of the fact that I just used the word intriguing to describe the book cover.  So, it is best to conclude that Kira-Kira is an intriguing book.  And because I can’t summarize it better than the book jacket:

Glittering. That’s how Katie Takeshima’s sister, Lynne, makes everything seem. The sky is kira-kira because its color is deep but see-through at the same time. The sea is kira-kira frot he same reason. And so are people’s eyes. When Katie and her family move from a Japanese community in Iowa to the Deep South of Georgia, it’s Lynn who explains to her why people stop them on the street to stare. And it’s Lynn who, with her speial way of viewing the world, teaches Katie to look beyond tomorrow. But when Lynn becomes desperately ill and the whole family begins to fall apart, it is up to Katie to find a way to remind them all that there is always something glittering — kira-kira — in the future.

This book covers it all. From the friendship and love between two sisters to family dynamics, struggling to make ends meet, racism, prejudice, discrimination, harsh working conditions in the factories, the American dream, illness, death, grief, honesty, and pushing forward with life. I knew from the first few pages that this was going to be a sad story. I was drawn into this family’s story. I wanted to ease their pain and suffering. I wanted everything to turn out all right. I felt that Lynne’s thoughts and feelings were so honest and true. Her character touched me.

I would highly recommend this book to readers of all ages and felt it deserving of the Newbery. I seriously don’t know how Cynthia could have packed one more “theme” into this book, it certainly gave me a lot to think about and learn from. I enjoyed it and have Cynthia Kadohata’s book Weedflower on the shelf for one of my next reads. I am looking forward to it.

Visit Cynthia Kadohata’s website here.
Other great blogger reviews of this book include Shelf Elf, The Well Read Child, and A Patchwork of Books. Check them out.