Diversity in the details

Dear Annie,

Happy post-Thanksgiving!  That was a very impressive list of resources for diverse books.  You talked about getting involved in school book fairs -- excellent!  Most of my knowledge comes from supplying one annual book fair which gets all its books from us, with which we've evolved a really lovely list.  We should talk about book fairs more in the future: I think a lot of schools charge into them without defining why they're doing them.  A blog for another day.

Today we have one more request from your bid for same.  Dawn writes:

 I'd like to learn about more books like *Anna Hibiscus* that are good for gently introducing children to global diversity. At Alice's insistence we read *Anna Hibiscus* together three times, and it was only our insistence on moving on to *The Borrowers* that kept us from reading it again.

Anna Hibiscus is of course a big favorite of ours.  Dawn, I assume you know it's a four book series.  Anna lives in a family compound in a city; Atinuke's No. 1 Car Spotter lives in rural Africa.  So far there are only two Car Spotter books.

I'm interpreting Dawn's question as having to do with more or less contemporary real life situations.  Moving south to Botswana, adult novelist Alexander McCall Smith has written two early-chapter book series for kids.  One chronicles the elementary school life of Precious Ramotswe, the heroine of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books. 

In
The Great Cake Mystery: Precious Ramotswe's Very First Case, Precious solves a case involving an unjust accusation of theft.  Her father, whose legacy funds her detective agency in adulthood, is very present in Precious's young life, a constant storyteller. 

Iain McIntosh's illustrations give a refreshingly different feel to the book series.

They're gentle and engaging mysteries.

McCall Smith's earlier children's series is about a boy named Akimbo, whose father is head ranger in a game preserve.  The stories include everyday life scenes, and adventures he's involved in because of his father's work.  Akimbo and the Lions is a younger variation of Born Free: Akimbo raises a lion cub but then realizes he has to send it back to the wild when it starts scaring his neighbors.  In Akimbo and the Elephants, he tries to catch ivory poachers who have been killing elephants.  They're great stories -- I used to sell a lot of them.  They're all now unfortunately out of print -- links are to alibris used listings.

Back to the north of the continent, a classic picture book:
The Day of Ahmed's Secret by Florence Parry Heide and Judith Heide Gilliland, illustrated by Ted Lewin (written in 1995).   Ahmed, bursting with excitement because he has a secret, drives his donkey cart through the streets of Cairo delivering bottled cooking gas.  (Spoiler alert: the secret will be revealed.)   We get a sense of the intensely rich and varied street life of the city.  When he finally gets back home, he announces the secret: he's learned to write his name.  I once had a customer who used this one as the central book in a first grade book group about urban life.


Another what-life-is-like on the street picture book is On My Way to Buy Eggs, by Chih-Yuan Chen.  A girl in Taiwan walks to the store to buy eggs, finding constant diversion in what she sees: a shadow, a blue marble, a pair of glasses.  Also not available new in the U.S.  Link is alibris.

I hope, Dawn, that these are books you haven't yet discovered.

Happy reading!

Deborah

Reading about the family compound

Dear Annie,

Today I sent off tens of thousands of dollars' worth of orders for kids' books for a new store that we'll be opening in a few weeks in Virginia.  It's so much fun to go through lists of all the books our current stores have sold recently and try to shape a new book section based on books I like.  One of the joys of the job.

Another joy is finding, in the midst of many many sample books, a gem of a new book.  This weekend I discovered Anna Hibiscus, by a Nigerian-born storyteller named Atinuke. (She currently lives in Wales.)  It's an early chapter book with a lovely lilting tone about a girl who lives in an unnamed African city.  Her extended family lives in a compound where the grandparents are revered, where most of the grown-ups have cellphones and commute to their jobs, and where a young child faces universal challenges figuring out what the world is like. 

Anna's father grew up in this family; Anna's mother is from Canada.

    One day, Anna's mother told the family that in Canada she grew up in a house with only her mother and her father.
   "What?" cried Auntie Grace.  "All alone?  Only the three of you?"
   "Yes, and I had a room all of my own," Anna's mother said wistfully.
   Anna's grandmother looked at her.  "Dey make you sleep alone?" she asked.
   "It was not a punishment," Anna's mother said.  "It was a good thing to have my own room."
   Anna Hibiscus and her cousins looked at each other.  Imagine!  Sleeping alone.  Alone in the dark!
   "Nobody likes to sleep alone," said Anna's grandmother.
   Anna Hibiscus laid her warm brown cheek on her mother's white arm.  "Don't worry, Mama," she said.  "You have all of us now.  You will never be alone again."

Anna's mother yearns for a little more solitude, so the nuclear family of Anna's parents, Anna, and her twin baby brothers goes off to the seaside by themselves.  Chaos ensues, and slowly relatives from the city compound arrive to lighten the load and cheer everyone up.

In another chapter, Auntie Comfort is coming to visit from America.  The family worries that she has forgotten the African ways, so with the help of her Uncle Tunde, Anna sneaks off to send some text messages to America.  Comfort arrives satisfyingly African:

 

Although the question of what is African is debatable:

   "Welcome, Comfort!" Grandfather said.

   "Thank you, Father," Auntie Comfort replied.  "But I am now called Yemisi."

   "Why?" said Grandmother.  "What is wrong with Comfort?"

   "I wanted to have an African name, Mama," said Auntie Comfort.

   The aunties started to laugh.

   "Comfort is an African name," said Grandmother.

   "But it is an English word, Mama," said Auntie Comfort.

   "It is an English word, but an African name," said Grandfather.  "Have you ever heard of any English person being called Comfort?  Come, enough of this.  Let us eat."

The gentle sense of humor reminds me a bit of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books, done for the under-eight crowd.  (Smith has a lovely early chapter book series set in a wildlife sanctuary in Africa, but I'll save that one for another day.)  Several of the stories  have Anna wanting to push the boundaries of behavior (I won't fix my hair, I want to sell oranges on the street) and while the parental generation tries to stop her, the grandparents let her go ahead, and take the consequences.  The lesson learned in the orange chapter has to do with understanding that she is a child of a prosperous family and other children must work hard to live.

So far there are two Anna Hibiscus books out in the U.S.  It wouldn't surprise me to see more. 

Love,

Deborah