Category Archives: Playing Card Project (PCP)

PCP Three of Diamonds: Separate is Never Equal

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separate is never equalSeparate is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation

by Duncan Tonatiuh

Abrams, 2014

In 1943, Sylvia Mendez, her two brothers, and three cousins all go to the local 17th Street Elementary School to register. Sylvia’s light-skinned cousins are accepted, and she and her brothers are told they’ll need to enroll at the inferior Mexican school, father from their home. Sylvia’s parents aren’t having it, and push back, filing file suit, undertaking multiple appeals, and ultimately prevailing. Tonatiuh’s account details the family’s many struggles, from the complexities of the legal process to the personal attacks Sylvia experiences. After rigorous research, and interviews with Sylvia herself, Tonatiuh delivers a story that is both compelling and inspiring. And his archetypal artwork, with its Pre-Columbian influences, connects the contemporary fight with its formidable ancestry. The strong lines, simplified postures, and fixed profiles convey the family’s resolute determination; theirs is a victory that comes from strength, and a strength that comes from family.

PCP Three of Clubs: When I Was the Greatest

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when i was the greatestWhen I Was the Greatest

by Jason Reynolds

Atheneum, 2014

This funny, gritty, tender story follows three young men growing up in Bed-Stuy, navigating the pressures and tensions that would pull them up or drag them under as they make their way to manhood. There’s Ali, bright, respectful and curious; Noodles, tight, irascible, and full of bravado; and his brother Needles, sweet, fragile, and genius. Needles struggles with Tourette’s, a syndrome his neighborhood doesn’t really understand, and finds solace in knitting (Ali’s mother’s very good idea), something else not everybody gets. Ali and Noodles have his back, until one night, at a house party, all hell breaks loose, and everything breaks apart.

There is so much to love here. The crisp writing crackles with wit and rings with authenticity. The exploration of maleness, and the ways in which young men are called to define themselves, is bare and nuanced. Every single character lives and breathes in three dimensions. But for our playing card purposes, it is these boys’ inextricable relationship that beats at this marvelous novel’s heart. Theirs is a special bond, and no matter what comes at them, they belong to one another.

For those looking for an especially immersive and gratifying experience, I recommend Random House Audio’s extraordinary audiobook recording, narrated by J.B. Adkins.

PCP Two of Spades: Born in the Wild

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born in the wildBorn in the Wild: Baby Mammals and Their Parents

by Lita Judge

Roaring Brook Press, 2014

This bright, instructive exploration of different mammal families offers lots of concrete information about what mammal babies need and how mammal parents meet those needs. Sections feature a brief identification of a particular need on a single spread, followed by a few pages with specific examples of different species attention to it. The text is full of fascinating explicatory zoological detail about everything from food to shelter. But the star of this charming outing is Judge’s open, inviting portraiture that finds a perfect balance of natural authenticity and friendly accessibility. The informative text provides the facts and figures, delineating our common place in the natural world, and the warm, soulful imagery makes good on that promise, allowing the reader to feel the connection as well as understand it. In a world where growing up can feel like a daunting endeavor, how comforting it is to know that we’re all in it together.

PCP Two of Hearts: The Thing About Luck

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the thing about luckThe Thing About Luck

by Cynthia Kadohata, with illustrations by Julia Kuo

Atheneum, 2013

I am a huge fan of Cynthia Kadohata’s work. Huge. I was on the committee that selected Kira-Kira, her first book for children, as the 2005 Newbery Medal winner, and I have loved every subsequent book. There is a quiet, raw honesty that runs through her writing, a transparency of language that sneaks up on you and, out of events that seem mundane, delivers something exquisite and profound. It’s like magic.

The Thing About Luck tells the story of a Japanese American farming family toiling amidst a flurry of bad luck. Sunny’s parents have been called away to Japan on emergency family business, leaving Sunny and her little brother Jaz in the care of her grandparents Obaachan and Jiichan, saddled with the back-breaking work of itinerant, contract wheat harvesting. Kadohata paints the circumstances in vivid, albeit plainspoken detail: Sunny’s fear of mosquitoes (she had malaria once); Jaz’s difficulty connecting; Obaachan’s strict, traditional ways; Jiichan’s tireless effort; and an impossibly thorough explanation farm machinery. And somehow, in the spaces between these definitions and explanations, she offers a tender, immediate, indelible portrait of family that is as touching as it is unique. These are people who love one another deeply, and Kadohata’s ability to show us that love, in the conflicts and struggles that would threaten it, is simply staggering.

PCP Two of Diamonds: My Book of Life By Angel

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my book of life by angelMy Book of Life By Angel

by Martine Leavitt

Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2012

The grief surrounding her mother’s death and the havoc it wreaks on her family pushes Angel to breaking. She slips onto the streets, and soon is in thrall to charming, malevolent Call and his “candy.” At first she’s doing favors for his friends, but in short order she finds herself working a corner to support herself and her habit. She is broken and resigned, until Call shows up one evening with eleven-year-old Melli in tow. Angel searches her soul to find an untapped store of resilience and resolve, and sets out to rescue Melli, and maybe, herself.

Leavitt writes in stunning, atmospheric free verse, and somehow manages to craft crystalline beauty from brutal, harrowing circumstances. Angel’s first-person narrative swings between blunt resignation and fierce defiance, beautifully articulating the confused despair of her gradual destitution and the clambering strength of her willful climb back up. It’s a staggering piece of writing–searing and evocative–and leaves the young reader with a profound understanding of the complex circumstances some teens face, full of empathy and free from judgment.

PCP Two of Clubs: Denied Detained Deported

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denied detained deportedDenied Detained Deported: Stories from the Dark Side of American Immigration

by Ann Bausum

National Geographic, 2009

Negative space is an artistic construct that looks at the visual space around or between subjects as a place in an image where meaning can exist and communicate itself: objects can be defined by their own outlines, or by the outlines of adjacent objects. The construct has application in the study of literature, too, as we consider how an idea is shaped not only by its own definition but also by the definitions of related concepts. As we seek to understand “belonging” in books for young people, then, let us look not only at books that celebrate someone’s place in a particular community, but books that consider the refusal of such membership, too.

Ann Bausum applies such an approach to American history in Denied Detained Deported: Stories from the Dark Side of American Immigration, seeking to understand how people came to this country, by looking deeply and carefully at a number of situations where that arrival was thwarted. She begins with the familiar Emma Lazurus poem that appears on the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty, followed by a contemporary poem by Naomi Shihab Nye that offers a decidedly less welcoming vision of the US border. From there Bausum investigates a number of historical events, each titled with a different form of alienation. “Excluded” looks at the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which left Chinese immigrants ineligible for citizenship until 1943. “Denied” tells the story of the St. Louis, a ship carrying hundreds of German Jewish refugees that the US turned away in 1939. The author captures the events with arresting clarity, engaging the reader’s empathy and outrage with her precise language and documentary research. And on top of the harrowing stories Bausum posits questions about our contemporary treatment of those newest to our country, often subjected to xenophobic mistreatment and persecution.

By exacting the nature of fearsome, systematized alienation, Denied Detained Deported delivers a powerful picture of how important it is to belong.

PCP Ace of Spades: The Disenchantments

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11699055The Disenchantments

by Nina LaCour

Dutton, 2012

Colby and Bev have been saving for years (and years) for their year-long-backpack-around-Europe-before-college-trip. It’s going to be the best. They’re best friends, after all, and, well, Colby is pretty much in love with Bev. Except Bev isn’t going. She’s going to college instead. She applied ages ago. Sorry.

To make matters worse (or not quite so bad), Colby will be spending the summer before he’s not going to college traveling around with Bev and Meg and Alexa, The Disenchantments, managing their Pacific Northwest tour from his Uncle Pete’s VW van. There is some road-trip revelry here, and a goodly amount of deep adolescent angst, that keep things moving and give us plenty to think about along the way. But the novel’s real genius comes from profound clarity and resonance with which LaCour paints Colby’s circumstances. To be sure, not many of us have experienced this particular turn of events, but she makes something universal of the skittish confusion and achy disorientation that come when the dependability of high school gives way to the unknown of what comes next. It’s no easy path to tread, and Colby’s way through is thrilling and sad and powerfully affecting. By getting the trauma just right, LaCour makes the resultant growth immediately recognizable and especially gratifying.

PCP Ace of Hearts: When the Beat was Born: DJ Kool Herc and the Creation of Hip Hop

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when the beat was bornWhen the Beat was Born: DJ Kool Herc and the Creation of Hip Hop

by Laban Carrick Hill, illustrated by Theodore Taylor III

Roaring Brook, 2013

“Clive loved music.” So begins this spirited, affirmative biography of the inventor of Hip Hop, and right from the start we are primed for an exposition of how that love would manifest itself, on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, and around the world. The story offers a straightforward, linear account of DJ Kool Herc’s childhood in Jamaica, move to NYC, and self-propelled rise to prominence as DJ and legend, noting such innovations as inviting rapper friends to “MC” his parties, using dual turntables to extend the “break” between songs, and encouraging break dancing, calling out the b-boys and doing play-by-play of their acrobatic moves. The color quality of the illustrations is decidedly dark, with a predominance of murky grays,greens and browns, and strong, definitive shadows. Yet the book itself is remarkably positive and bright. On court, in line, and around the park, smiles abound. Indeed, everything we learn about DJ Kool Herc, from his devotion to his little sister and party partner, to the way his friendships played such a central role in his music, gives us a picture of an artist excited to share his world, replacing fighting with dancing, and loneliness with community. Ultimately, this is an affectionate portrait of an affectionate man, someone who loves his music and loves his people, all at once.

PCP Ace of Diamonds: Roller Derby Rivals

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roller derby rivalsRoller Derby Rivals

by Sue Macy, illustrated by Matt Collins

Holiday House, 2014

I love a book that looks at yesterday and makes me think hard about today. This is one of those books, a rowdy, rock-em-sock-em snapshot of a bygone rivalry that positively hums with contemporary resonance. Macy and Collins set their sights on the roller derby, in its day a hugely popular sport built of speed and spectacle, profiling two incandescent women and their fierce, secretly friendly competition. Gerry Murray is beauty, Midge “Toughie” Brasuhn is brawn, and their fabricated opposition reflected the shifting cultural conventions of post WWII America. Their battle unfolded on television, indeed roller derby itself gets some credit for helping to cement the medium’s popularity, and the orchestration of the conflict makes for an eerie predictor of what we now call reality television. Unlike so much of that contemporary entertainment, however, this was a valiant fight between worthy opponents (despite contrivances to the contrary) and the book follows suit, offering up an account built on respect and honor. Diamonds are our cards of strength, and there is so much of it expressed here, from the physical strength necessary to perform feats of derring-do (while whizzing around a track) to the more spiritual fortitude required to bypass cultural expectation and chart a different course. These were some strong women, and strength like that is just as admirable, and just as crucial, today as it ever was.

Boom.

To learn more about the Playing Card Project (PCP), visit our first entry, here.

Playing Card Project (PCP) Ace of Clubs

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Welcome to the first post in the Playing Card Project, a year-long series for 2015 through which we’ll build a deck of playing cards, one Tuesday at a time. We’ve established four suit-based themes and will investigate each theme in terms of how it is expressed in 13 different books for children and teens. 52 weeks, 52 cards, 52 books. Get it?

Our suit themes are as follows:

♣ Clubs – stories of belonging

♦ Diamonds – stories of strength

♥ Hearts – stories of affection

♠ Spades – stories of growth

And, yes, we will produce a physical deck of cards at year’s end, to be distributed widely, and free of charge, to anyone who is a friend of the Butler Center (so now would be a good time to start following this blog, btw).

I think things will make sense as we go, so let’s get to it!

For our first entry, the Ace of Clubs, I present

cradle meCradle Me

by Debby Slier

Starbright Books, 2012

This book is so full of charms it is hard to know where to begin, so I’ll begin with the babies. Each board page features a different baby ensconced on a cradle board, with a single word describing the baby’s disposition (peeking, crying, yawning, etc.). Individual babies represent different Native American tribes, with a color-coded key in the back (the background color on the baby page matches a decorative frame on the key page) to identify each nation. We know how much babies like looking at other babies (they LOVE it) and a board book built around that fascination is well-conceived. Add to that the exquisite photography, the easily manipulable trim-size, and the especially appropriate dispositional content, and this makes for a winning baby book.

We consider it here, though, not for its infantile excellence but because of its powerful message of belonging. On the surface, we see each individual baby, with specific dress and cradle board construction, as belonging to his or her nation. But in their universally recognizable circumstances and expressions we see that the babies belong to one another, too. And they belong to us, and we to them. Indeed, this is a book that proclaims our universal belonging, in the simple juxtaposition of eleven beautiful babies whose distinct identities serve, mostly, to demonstrate their community, and invite us right in.

One down, 51 to go. See you next Tuesday.