Izumi Tanaka is a normal, Northern California teenager. She’s an average student and spends much of her free time at the local diner with her friends, a quartet they’ve dubbed the Asian Girl Gang, or AGG. In her final semester of high school, life as she knows it suddenly comes to a halt when she discovers that her long lost father—a man she has never met—is the Crown Prince of Japan.
Category Archive: Children’s
In children’s literature and in young adult fiction, food is often used to bridge cultures—“dumplings are the great social equaliser” says the protagonist in the YA novel The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling as an example. And while food might be one of the easier entries into a culture, there are other ways too. Art, for example, which Singapore’s National Gallery does with success in its “Awesome Art” series.
Shaw Kuzki’s middle-grade novel Soul Lanterns begins in August 1970. A generation earlier, an atomic bomb leveled Hiroshima. Nozomi and her friends have grown up attending yearly memorials and learning about “the flash” in their peace studies class. When a much-loved art teacher takes an unexpected leave of absence, Nozomi begins to wonder about how the war really affected the adults in her life.
Tom is a young boy who is “ordinary most of the time”—that is, unless he’s visiting his grandmother Bea, an archaeologist whose artifacts have the power to transport Tom back into time.
There is an increasing number of young adult (YA) novels with an Asian focus—“Asian YA”, as fellow ARB reviewer Susan Blumberg-Kason recently wrote—and Wai Chim throws her hat into the ring, with The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling.
A hero in Japan, Beate Sirota is hardly a household name in her home country of the United States. Jeff Gottesfeld’s No Steps Behind: Beate Sirota Gordon’s Battle for Women’s Rights in Japan is a new picture book illustrated by Sheilla Witanto that tells Beate’s story and how she brought change to Japan after World War II.
While Asian protagonists are no longer rare in young adult fiction, some cultures seem more prevalent in the genre than others. Think Jenny Han’s books and the various K-Pop stories, as well as Taiwanese-American stories like Loveboat Taipei and Rent a Boyfriend. In an apparent first, Loan Le’s debut novel, A Pho Love Story, adds to this list with a rom-com featuring Vietnamese-American teens. Although the details of the Vietnamese refugee experience may not be familiar to all teens, the restaurant setting and accompanying food most likely will be.