Children's books for AAPI Heritage Month

Once you start one thing, it can always lead to other things.

As it happened, many of the ghostly children's picture books I read could fit in this category. 

Boy Dumplings: A Tasty Chinese Tale by Ying Chang Compestine and James Yamasaki 
Ghosts in the House by Kazuna Kahara
Gracie Meets a Ghost by Keiko Sena
So Not Ghoul by Karen Yin and Bonnie Liu

The most surprising for me was Boy Dumplings. 

A boy gets caught by a ghost who is going to eat him, but the boy convinces him that he should make a better meal. I thought that would go the route of the other ingredients being delicious enough that the boy was extraneous, but it was just that it took long enough for the sun to rise and the ghost to become trapped. 

There's more than one way to avoid becoming ghost food.

I used "could" fit into the category because there can always be questions about categorization.

For example, Keiko Sena was just Japanese, not Japanese-American. However, if I wanted to read more of her work and see her influence on children's books, she has about 100 other titles.

(This year I am worrying about tracking down origins a little less, though I will discuss that more when I get to the music.) 

Speaking of reading other books, Karen Yin has a book coming out that could apply, Nice to Eat You -- inspired by the story of Hansel and Gretel -- but it is not expected until July. I did read one of her other books:

Whole Whale, illustrated by Nelleke Verhoeff

That is mainly about all of the animal illustrations you can fit into a single book. So Not Ghoul is about the struggle to fit in at school and meet parental expectations, hard for a traditional ghost who looks vaguely like Samara from The Ring, except her long hair is in pigtails. Tradition versus assimilation, but with teenage ghosts.

Another book about tradition takes place at the Mid-Autumn Festival as a grandmother tells a story to two sisters.

The Shadow in the Moon: A Tale of the Mid-Autumn Festival by Christina Matula and Pearl Law

While the festival and moon cakes come up a lot, I had not read that particular story before. It was a little wordy, but I do like learning new lore.

Otherwise, there were two biographical and two that were a little less serious. The two biographical ones were both written by Songju Ma Daemicke and illustrated by Lin.

Grace Lee Boggs: Gardens of Hope
Tu Youyou's Discovery: Finding a Cure for Malaria

I had also read a book of Boggs' writings, which will come up later. It was one of two books in a short time period that dealt with dialectics as part of its philosophical underpinnings. Connections happen in all sorts of ways.

(Speaking of that, there is another pair that I am going to explore further next week.)

For the two less serious ones, both by A.N. Kang...

The Very Fluffy Kitty, Papillon
Papillon Goes to the Vet 

I thought they were very cute, but for me cats are an easy sell.