#4: "Memorial" illustrated by Shaun Tan

[sweet-adelheid.livejournal.com]

Memorial by Gary Crew, illustrations by Shaun Tan.

As this review is primarily for 50books_poc, it's going to focus on the illustrations by Shaun Tan. Having said that, the story (comments by three generations of a family on the importance of the Moreton Bay Fig that forms part of the town's war memorial, now threatened by 'progress') is stunning, and raises multiple issues/discussion points that my small group at the Hebrew Scriptures intensive I did recently had a great deal of fun discussing.

The illustrations, though - oh, the illustrations. Shaun Tan, what can you say? In this book he has a number of full-page, wordless spreads, and he makes the most of each of them. ( Read more... )

#5: "American Born Chinese" by Gene Luen Yang

[sweet-adelheid.livejournal.com]

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

I got to the end of the book and declared it awesome, but not unlike the movie of "The House of Sand and Fog", while I was reading it I wasn't entirely certain *why* it had the Printz Award sticker on the front cover. Clearly it was considered an amazing book - you don't win the Printz for something mediocre - but at the three-quarter point I was still wondering how the "Cousin Chin-Kee" storyline fit into the rest of it, and why on earth someone would write that storyline to begin with. And yet it all worked. In a really very awesome way.

( Contains spoilers )