8/50: Hush! A Thai Lullaby, by Min Fong Ho

[livii.livejournal.com]

I was undecided on whether to count this among my 50, but since I've already read it at least 5 times and, since it's been pretty well-received, expect I will end up reading it innumerable more times, I thought I would go ahead! As well, it was a prior review in this comm that led me to the book, for which I am grateful, and so I thought perhaps another member might find it useful as well. (Plus, the baby that this is being read to is severely limiting my ability to hit 50!)

Hush! is a lovely book, filled with truly beautiful pictures and a repetitive, poetic text all about a mother's efforts to get her child down for a nap. The animals she shushes - a mosquito, a monkey, a water buffalo, etc - all make interesting sounds and the setting provides a nicely different change of pace from puppies and kittens or barnyard animals. The story unfolds softly and sweetly, and it's a great way to expose a child to a different culture while still being about a universal issue - sleep! My son, who I'm reading it to, is almost 5 months, and it's a bit long - we don't read it usually in one session, but in chunks - but I think he'll grow well with it, as the art is so full of things to look at, discuss, and the animal sounds will be fun to imitate! I really recommend this book.

On that note, I'm wondering if anyone has any good recs for picture books for infants by authors or artists of colour with similarly different settings? The only other book he likes right now is pat the bunny and we - okay I - could use some variety, and since classics like Goodnight Moon struck out and Hush! didn't, I'm very keen to give more books of a similar vein a try!!

2. American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang (and bonus recs)

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

2. Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese is a graphic novel with three stories that gradually become connected in surprising (to me, anyway) ways: the legend of the Monkey King, the story of a second-generation Chinese American boy named Jin Wang, and the story of an American boy named Danny and his cousin Chin-Kee, the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype. The last story thread threw me for a loop at first, but it ends up tying in with the others in the end.

Yang's art (colored by Lark Pien) is fluid and lively; it's kind of what I think of as a "memoir" style, a bit reminiscent in its simplified but expressive appearance of graphic novel memoirs like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis or Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Although the story has fantastic elements, the characters feel very emotionally real.

The intertwined stories are all, in the end, about identity, and especially about owning your own identity in a wider society that doesn't approve of it. It's a beautiful graphic novel, and I really enjoyed it.

Yang has some commentary on different aspects of the book here.

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Bonus, completely unrelated, recs: I read these last year or the year before, so too long ago to really review, by Dr. Atul Gawande's Complications and Better are both excellent written and fascinating insight into modern U.S. medicine as well as the science of failure and error reduction. Several of Dr. Gawande's essays have been featured in Year's Best Science Writing anthologies, with good reason, and he has a lot of interesting things to say about the U.S. health care system (if you do not care about the U.S. health care system, the medical stories are still interesting). He has a new book out, The Checklist Manifesto, which I will be reviewing after I read it. (Dr. Gawande is Indian American.)