Violet is a girl who lives in a world where all of the people she knows are the colour of primary colours. One day her dad picks her up from school and a friend asks why her dad is blue and she is violet. Violet is a little upset by this and begins to question why she is different from all of the kids at school and even from her own parents. She goes home to ask her parents and her mom, who is red, while her dad is blue, sits her down and tells her that it's not a bad thing to be different from the kids at school. She puts blue and red paint on a piece of paper and mixes them together to demonstrate that violet is a combination of her mom and her dad, making her special because she is a little bit of both of them. Violet feels happy that she is a bit of both her parents and the next day at school tells the friend so with pride.
This is a good book to introduce racial difference in a very non-confrontational way. The different colours could represent different things to different people, but it teaches that though you may be different from people on the outside, you should always be proud of who you are because you are a special person. Blue and red are pretty generic colours, so it isn't a book about certain races or orientations, but is abstract enough to let anyone insert themselves.
I enjoyed this book. I was in the book store one day and it caught my eye so I flipped through it, and I'm glad I did.
It's about a little girl who comes from Korea and moved to North America. She goes to school and doesn't want to tell the class her name because it is different. She says she doesn't have a name, so her classmates make a name jar for her and put in names that she can use. Then she gets a letter from her grandmother who is still in Korea saying how much she loves her and in the letter was a seal with her name on it. After getting this she is once again proud of her name and goes back to school and tells her class mates her real name and what it means (I apologize if I got some of the details mixed up it was a while back that I read it). This book was a tear jerker for me. I'm not Korean, nor have I had major problem with my name (though people often mispronounce it when reading it), but the struggle for the acceptance of one's self and one's own difference in comparison to others is something we all go through, and this story successfully displays that struggle and overcoming that struggle in a simple way. I think its a good way to get children to understand that though they are different, they will be accepted by someone, and opens them up to other cultures at the same time. Worth the read.
This story portrayed the forced Japanese emigration during the WW2 period. Many many Japanese families were sent back to Japan because the government thought they could be used as spies, even though many of these people were born in North America.
The story is about a girl who goes to visit her grandmother. The next door neighbour is an older Japanese man and the girl goes over to help him with his garden every day. The garden is something she's never seen before, it has no flowers or plants, it's mostly rocks and has a pond with koi fish, which she feeds. Then one day her grandmother tells her that many Japanese people are being sent away, and she finds out that the old man is one of them. She sits with the old man watching the sun go down and promises him that she'll look after his garden for him. After a while a new couple moves in and tears up the garden, replacing it with a western style garden. The girl takes the fish and sets them free and a stone and when she gets home she starts a small rock garden of her own.
I thought this was a good way to relay the information in picture book form. It tells the reader what happened and lets them feel the sadness, but does it gently.
