Charlotte's web

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both." --E.B. White, the last line of Charlotte's Web.

I think from the first time we read Charlotte's Web, we think about it as a story of friendship. But given this last line, would it pay off to start from the beginning and think about it, too, as a story about the power of storytelling to make things happen?

The community came to view Wilbur the way they did through the words Charlotte chose to describe him.

Did Charlotte, by granting Wilbur the self-confidence that someone believed in him, and giving him a goal to strive towards, also actually turn him into someone who could accurately be described in the words she wrote?

Does calling someone's attention to a quality they possess - nascent though it may be - inspire them to cultivate it?

Book review: I Love You like Crazy Cakes

I had noticed "I Love You Like Crazy Cakes" in my local bookstore before Sandie began her adoption journey. The lovely, peaceful watercolor illustrations caught my eye every time I went past the display, so when I had the excuse of this blog, I jumped at the chance to purchase a copy.

I put it away for a while, intent on other projects. But this summer, when I saw some of Anna's watercolors, I felt they were vaguely reminiscent, and mentioned the book to her. My comment was met with astonishment and delight, for it was, in fact, one of the very books she had referenced.

So the book has been here waiting patiently for me to post about it for a couple of months. And now, flailing about trying to find something to say in the longest November on record, I turn gratefully to it once more.

"I Love You Like Crazy Cakes" follows the story of a woman who adopts a baby girl from China. It is based on the author's own adoption experience, and is written as if in response to a question from her young daughter about how they came to be together.

As you would imagine from this description, the mother simplifies a fair bit for her young listener, so the whole adoption goes off lightning fast and without a single hitch, and the baby takes to her immediately. (Ah, poetic license.) With its simple and direct language, the book works well as a story to read to a young child.

Now, I know that Sandie prefers that the adoption stories she purchases show a family situation as close to her own as possible, and this one does feature a single mother and no siblings. I thought about this when I chose to purchase it, as I'm fully expecting to pass all of these books over to her in time. And I concluded that, while the book focuses specifically on the relationship between the mother and the daughter, it doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility that there may be other members of the family. If one wanted, one could easily add more family members into the list of people who come meet the baby once she's off the plane. (I always felt free to add and change things in the picture books I read to my little brother when he was young. He never called me on it! Authors, please don't kill me for this!) However, Sandie, if you feel hesitant, I'd be happy to keep this one with me. It really is a very pretty book and I wouldn't at all mind having it for my collection.

Buy this book (or just read more about it):

Snowflakes

In celebration and recognition of our first snow of the season, I present a link to a site on snowflakes, run by the gentleman whose snowflake pictures appeared on the 39 cent snowflake stamps back in 2006. The site offers gorgeous close-up photos, snowflake facts and physics, and some ideas of snow-related activities for kids and adults.

If you become inspired here, you can seek out Paula Nadelstern's "Snowflakes & Quilts," to learn how to make amazing snowflake quilts. (The book is out of print, but I was able to find it last year at a quilt store for its original price. I include the link to Amazon so you can read a little about it; I'm not recommending that you purchase it at that inflated price!) Or just take the easier and more economical route and go goggle at the quilt gallery on her website!

Kira's Pictures

I purchased some software to turn the Kira's Castle illustrations into a slideshow for Anna.

I'm not feeling up to writing a big introduction right now, but I think you'd rather just get to the good stuff anyway, wouldn't you? :)

Kira's story

In June, my mother mentioned that she was making a castle wall hanging for my little niece. She often will write stories to go along with the gifts she gives the kids, and started bouncing some ideas off of me.

I responded back, and suddenly found that I was in charge of writing the story!

While sharing a draft of Kira's Castle with a friend, it occurred to me that, hey, she knows how to draw. So I asked if maybe I could hire her to illustrate the story.

After drafts and exchanges of images and words, and editing to fit the pics (and vice-versa), about a month after we got started, the whole thing is written, illustrated, printed, and bound. It is now wending its way through the mail on the way to my niece. I have also been thinking vaguely about "publishing" it via lulu or something for a lark. :)

Meanwhile, my mother's closing in on finishing the wall hanging. This is how the pre-quilted top looks:



I hope Kira likes her birthday gifts! :)

Book review: Over the Moon

Another adoption-related book that was recommended by Amazon reviewers is "Over the Moon: An Adoption Tale." Like "A Quilt of Wishes," this story and its illustrations were inspired by the adoption experience of its author (and illustrator!) Karen Katz. In this case, the adoption took place in Guatemala, although the country isn’t mentioned by name.

"Once upon a time," the story begins, "a teeny-tiny baby was born." The infant beams, cradled upon the softest cloud in the middle of a golden meadow. Fireworks burst around her organically, as if all of nature is celebrating her arrival.

As you might guess from this opening, "Over the Moon" is more a fairytale than a factual account of the adoption process: the child is appears as if by magic; the parents pick her up and take her home. There are no complications or delays, nobody ever frowns, and the skies are not cloudy all day. Life is very simple and very grand. (Because of this simplicity, the story would be accessible even to very young children.)

I enjoyed the text's lyrical moments ("you grew like a flower in another lady’s tummy"), but for me, it is the illustrations that really make the story. Every page overflows with beautiful, bright colors, curves, interesting shapes and visual textures, playfully dancing images, and a sense of perspective that may owe something to medieval art (size represents not distance but importance in the story – "extras" are small, named characters are medium, and our protagonists are enormous) . The pictures are a lot of fun (and would make fun folk-style appliqué quilts).

The images do more than just accompany the text: they help us to see the parents’ joy more eloquently than any words could. On the pages where the radiant parents learn their child has been born, for instance, the mother leaps into her husband’s arms. They quite literally are floating - off the ground and over the moon! Although the artistic style is quite different, I was reminded of the way happiness lifts Chagall's lovers off their feet (cf. Romeo and Juliet or Lovers with Flowers). Here too, it seems, joy is a natural law that more than exceeds the puny laws of physics.

In these pictures, Katz, quite simply, has captured the essence of joy.

Personalize your fictional family!

DH suggests, given people's tendency to gravitate towards the familiar, that there might be a market for popular picture books with parental permutations. Just sketch in (or erase) a parent in the background, do a global search-and-replace on some pronouns, and the book appeals to a whole new audience!

You could imagine extending this so that potential buyers could go through a checklist to select the parent's/parents' genders, races, statures (endomorph vs. ectomorph), features, etc., and really come out with something completely personalized.

Do you think it'd sell? ;)

Families just like yours

Sandie and I have both been looking through adoption-related books online lately. At Amazon, primarily. Amazon has more reviews than any other online bookstore I’ve seen. Many of the reviews are really insightful, and there have been several occasions where they have inspired me to revise my shopping list.

Sometimes, though, reviewers’ concerns or issues color their comments so much that these reviews become virtually useless for others.

One of the issues for some of the adoption book reviewers seems to be the composition of adoptive families. I found reviews from single mothers who, instead of evaluating a book on its merits, stated that they had simply chosen not to purchase this book because the family portrayed included a father. Likewise, I saw reviews from adoptive two-parent families dismissing other books simply because no father was depicted.

I found myself somewhat puzzled. Things like an interesting, well-written story and engaging illustrations are my top priorities for a picture book – and these are the things that I, like most readers, hope to learn about in a book review. A comparison of the fictional family and the family of some stranger on the internet just isn’t all that helpful or relevant to me.

Now, I do understand the impulse to give your child books and things that speak directly to her situation. When I visited American Girl Place last year, I was fascinated with Jess, the 2006 American Girl doll of the year, because she was half Japanese (like my own hypothetical children would be). Even though I don’t have a daughter (or even the prospect of one on the horizon), I still considered digging deep into my wallet to purchase the doll. (How often do you find a mixed race doll, anyway?) It’s important for children to see that there are interesting, worthwhile people (fictional or non-) who look like they do, act like they do, have experiences like theirs, or are similar in some other respect.

As a child, I enjoyed books like that - books where I felt like could relate to the characters. Periodically I came across a character who maintained her self-esteem even while displaying a terrible shock of ginger hair; or one who prospered even though she shared some very familiar weaknesses. It was comforting to feel that, even if I was flawed, at least I wasn’t uniquely flawed. ;)

But the characters in my beloved books didn’t have to be my Doppelgängers for me to relate to them. Even when I was very young, I, like any child, was able to make the imaginative leap between myself and the strong-willed badger heroine of Bread and Jam for Frances, between my concerns and those of the humble little pig in Charlotte's Web; I didn’t need to sprout a striped pelt or grow a snuffly snout to see myself in them. I loved the pioneer stories like the Little House on the Prairie series and Caddie Woodlawn, and I adored learning about Jewish life in turn-of-the-century New York through the sisters of All-of-a-kind Family, even though my own life was very different.

It was wonderful to be able to visit these fictional (or semi-fictional) worlds, so different from my own, and yet so similar. How many things I learned, and how many questions followed, with so many new experiences to process. I would not have learned so much if the protagonists had been just like me.

Details of self, family, community, faith, may differ in any given book, but our human concerns, deep down, remain the same: Who am I? Where do I fit in my family and my community? Am I loved? Is there some higher or deeper meaning to my life? Will the world be a better place because I was here? It is this common humanity, the things that make us human, that bring us together.

I think there would be room in my adoptive child's library for stories that reflect her specific experiences, for stories that speak to her on a more universal level, and for stories that do a little of both. She'd miss out on so much otherwise.

Book review: A Quilt of Wishes

While scanning the web for information relating to the 100 Good Wishes custom, I came across a reference to a children's picture book on just this subject. After waffling over the hardback version in my local bookstore, I decided to purchase it in paperback from Amazon.

The book is called "A Quilt of Wishes," and it was written by Teresa Orem Werner and illustrated by Nathan Tremlin. From the acknowledgements page, it is clear that the story was based on the Werner family's experiences preparing for the arrival of their internationally-adopted daughter, Natalie Xiao Li.

The story tells of Xiao Li, an orphan in China, and her adoptive parents. While the parents wait for the adoption process to complete, they worry about their little girl, wondering whether she is safe and warm there on the other side of the world.

Remembering how her childhood quilt brought her warmth and comfort, the mother begins a quilt for her baby daughter. Friends and family members learn about this blanket, and send scraps of brightly colored cloth together with beautiful wishes for the little girl. When the quilt is complete, the mother sends it to China.

Xiao Li's nanny opens the box and admires the beautiful quilt, remembering the 100 Good Wishes quilt she was given when she was a child. But this quilt only has 50 squares. She takes it home with her that night, and, in a lovely scene, "within an hour, fifty women who had come to love Xiao Li... showed up with squares of fabric to be added to the quilt." Together they use red thread to stitch the old and new squares together, creating a quilt that will wrap Xiao Li in love and good wishes that stretch from the land of her birth to the land where her future lies.

(As a quilter, I wondered briefly how they added new squares without completely deconstructing the old quilt, but I found myself too caught up in the story to give more than a passing thought to such technicalities.)

When the parents come to get the little girl, the new and improved quilt stands as visible testimony to just how deeply she was loved and cared for even before they held her in their arms. The mother wonderingly realizes that the soft blanket which had been meant to comfort her daughter has comforted her own fears as well.

If there were anything I would change about this sweet book, it's probably something that's partially my own fault. When I saw the hardback version at my bookstore, the illustrations were intensely colored but lovely; when I opened the box to look at the paperback I purchased online, I saw pictures that seemed heavy on magenta. While this gives the Good Wishes quilt a luscious ruby border, and makes the famous red couch at the White Swan Hotel practically glow, it also means that the mother and baby appear sunburned throughout the story. (I probably should have paid more attention to the relative colors of the book covers when I viewed them online.)

While the hardback is a little more expensive (as you would expect), the author has pledged to donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale to the FTIA foster care program in Changsha, Hunan, China, so that other babies can receive the same quality care that her daughter Natalie did.

FTIA supports foster care programs in Hunan and Zhanjiang, China. These programs sponsor carefully selected foster families to care for children who would otherwise be raised in an orphanage. While the orphanages give the children the best care possible, in-home foster care allows for children to receive much more personal care and attention than an institution can provide.

Donations to these programs are used to provide foster care and better quality nutrition for the children. Participating foster parents receive training and education by our FTIA staff in China to better equip them to care for the children.

100% of all monies received for these programs are used for the children – nothing is deducted for any kind of administrative expenses. All administrative costs are provided for by FTIA. (FTIA, "China Foster Care Program")

The early years are such a critical time in a child's development that programs like this really can make a tremendous difference in the lives of those little ones. It's hard to begrudge a few dollars to such a worthy cause.

Buy it in hardback: