127 research outputs found
\u3cem\u3eStory Boat\u3c/em\u3e (2020) by Kyo Maclear
No full textWhen the protagonist in Kyo Maclear’s Story Boat (2020) opens the book with “Here we are,” it is unclear to readers where exactly “here” might be. When safety must take precedence over familiarity, one develops a fleeting relationship with place. It is tempting, in stories like these, to emphasize the pain of the refugee experience: the uncertainty, the loss of one’s ‘heres’. But Maclear takes a different tack, giving readers the tools to focus on hope and wonder. Teachers may prompt students, in light of the book, to reflect on what they think a ‘home’ or a ‘here’ feels like – stable, certain, warm, safe – and what sorts of things in their lives, outside of ‘place,’ carry those same qualities: a memento, perhaps, or an activity or a ritual. By highlighting these possibilities in their own lives and hearing from others, students may recognize new ways to anchor themselves: an instrumental coping skill for anyone enduring a significant change.https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/iapc_thinkingstories_picturebooks/1046/thumbnail.jp
Virginia Wolf by K. Maclear.
No full textMaclear, Kyo. Virginia Wolf. Illus. Isabelle Arsenault. Toronto : Kids Can Press, 2010. Print. Vanessa awakes one morning to find her sister, Virginia, transformed. Virginia is not herself. She has become furtive and embittered, snippy and distinctly wolfish. While Isabelle Arsenault\u27s illustrations have a consistent prettiness and amiable levity, the ambiguous and slightly sinister nature of Virginia\u27s\u27 transformation is undeniable. Kyo Maclear\u27s narrative balances how children will interpret the change that has come over Virginia and Vanessa\u27s attempts to return her sister to herself and how adults will understand the allusions to depression and alienation. Virginia is literally - in the context of a child\u27s understanding and the illustrations - a wolf in an archetypal little girl\u27s dress. She is also genuinely frightening in the depths and intensity of her withdrawal and this gives Virginia Wolf a lovely little frisson of fairy tale dread. Vanessa perseveres in trying to redeem her sister and rescue her from her dour transformation. It is creativity, honesty of self-expression and love that eventually reestablish the sister\u27s rapport. As Maclear elegantly conveys, accompanied by an inspired and expressive page design, “Down became up. Dim became bright. Gloom became glad.” Inspired by Maclear\u27s creative interpretation of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, the story can be enjoyed at many different levels. The reader can certainly intuit how much the writer and artist enjoy each other’s work and are relishing the imaginative potential of their subject matter. The layered complexity of the text is enriched by the intuitive collaboration between artist and writer evident in the evocative text and toothsomely vivid illustrations.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Matilda Roche Matilda spends her days lavishing attention on the University of Alberta’s metadata but children’s illustrated books, literature for young adults and graphic novels also make her heart sing. Her reviews benefit from the critical influence of a four year old daughter and a one year old son – both geniuses. Matilda’s super power is the ability to read comic books aloud
The Good Little Book by K. Maclear
No full textMaclear, Kyo. The Good Little Book. Illustrated by Marion Arbona. Tundra Books, 2015.In this work, Maclear uses allegorical techniques to expand on compelling themes. Her protagonist is unnamed; he is “the boy,” every boy who loves to read. The Good Little Book is every book that captivates a reader. Its author is unnamed. Its characters are not delineated. Only a captioned illustration, one of Arbona’s many colorful offerings, provides clues to the book’s plot and impact:“It carried him to the deep sea and steered him towards a faraway land. It dazzled him and stumped him and made him laugh and gasp. He read it through. Then he turned back to the beginning and read it again.”[pp.11-12]Humour is a feature of the work; Maclear likes to play with words--literary words. The Good Little Book resides with others, one of which has won the “Called a Cat” medal. We are informed, however, that “The good little book…had no shiny medals…it didn’t even own a proper jacket.” [p.3]The protagonist’s compulsion to read and reread his good little book introduces the first theme: books transport us to imagined worlds. When the book is lost, then rediscovered, a secondary theme emerges: books are to be shared.Text and illustration lead the reader to surmise that “the boy” is school-aged, a child physically mature enough to walk his dog while riding a skateboard. He is, of course, an avid and independent reader. Tormented by the loss of his book, he is old enough to hunt for it on his own, to scour crowded and heavily trafficked streets, to search the public library. Initially, he appears to have an age appropriate appreciation of the book’s capacity to occupy his mind, to move his thoughts.“The book the boy thought couldn’t do anything did many things.” [p.11] “It did become a loyal companion, there to see him to sleep and distract him when he had to “think things over.””[p.13].To this point, the boy’s relationship with the book seems in keeping with the primary theme: book as intellectual transport. Suddenly, his thought processes revert to those of a much younger child.“The boy worried. How would such a good and quiet book survive? What would it do if it found itself at the edge of the unknown? Or among frightful enemies?...the book did not have skills that would help it in the dangerous wild….”[pp.19-20 ]The story becomes even more anthropomorphic when the book is discovered by various creatures:“A squirrel thought it might be a thriller. A sparrow thought it might be a romance. A raccoon thought it might be a sandwich.” [p.29 ]These developments raise a question: “Who is the intended reader?” A child who has completed grade three would generally have both the ability and the maturity to read the book and to appreciate its messages. This reader might, initially, identify with the protagonist’s dilemma. But would this same youngster identify with thinking that becomes, in the lexicon of child psychologists, animistic? One can readily imagine a nine-year-old reader’s sudden dismissal of the work as, “…a little kid’s book.” One can also imagine that a preschooler would listen with rapt attention to the anthropomorphic sections, but zone out during the development of the book’s themes. Finally, it may be that only librarians, booksellers, and children’s literature specialists would appreciate the humour. In sum, maintaining a clear vision of the intended reader or listener is a requisite in any kind of storytelling; The Good Little Book falls short in this regard.Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Leslie AitkenLeslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship involved selection of children’s literature for school, public, special, and university collections. She is a former Curriculum Librarian at the University of Alberta.</jats:p
Nation of Terrible Jewish Daughters
No full textNation of Terrible Jewish Daughters is a work of hybrid creative nonfiction which addresses questions around the nature of motherhood, daughterhood, and nationhood. Through a collection of essays, spanning centuries and continents, this writing explores themes of migration, mental illness, and (imagined) community belonging and can be seen as part of the ongoing feminist corrective project offering a multiplicity of voices and a diversity of experiences around the topic of motherhood. Written through a lens of historical marginality and second-generation culture making, this work is shaped by literature that centers Jewish characters and stories.2999-01-0
Birdmania: A Remarkable Passion for Birds by Bernd Brunner, Mozart\u27s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, and Birds Art Life by Kyo Maclear
No full textReview of Bernd Brunner\u27s Birdmania: A Remarkable Passion for Birds, Lyanda Lynn Haupt\u27s Mozart\u27s Starling, and Ky Maclear\u27s Birds Art Life
Sifting: An Illustrated Memoir in Fragments
No full textSifting is a hybrid memoir following a 30-year old millennial named Erica who embarks on a road trip to the northwest coast of British Columbia with her younger sibling. Erica and her sibling are Yonsei (4th generation) Japanese and Chinese Canadian and feel distanced from family history due to the Japanese Canadian internment and its ensuing pressures to assimilate. The siblings drive from urban southwest B.C. through rural landscapes in search of their late grandmother’s birthplace, passing through lands and waterways which Indigenous communities have stewarded since time immemorial. Along the way, Erica sifts through layers of history revealing complex ecological, cultural, and political truths. Written in first-person, Sifting uses a patchwork narrative composed of prose, poetry, diaristic text, hand-drawn illustrations, collage, photography, and mixed media art.2999-01-0
You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked.
No full textYou are Eating an Orange. You are Naked is a 'novel' centered on a relationship between a young couple. The entire book is narrated by the male character and most of it is addressed to the female character. Instead of having one continuous narrative, Orange is written in episodes. Each episode has its own title and can be read as a self-contained piece. The book is also experimental in regard to genre; i.e., it plays with the notion that a novel might be an essay or a play, and vice-versa. This hybrid approach allows me to find a form that best fits the episode’s content. Each episode is set in a different place. My characters live in Toronto and travel to Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Nagoya, Tokyo, and Prague. Nothing crazy or overly dramatic ever happens. Everything in the book is just everyday life in words.2999-01-0
Boat Stains
No full textBoat Stains is a coming to language memoir. The narrator is a young woman who was raised in Toronto by two refugees from whom she’s inherited two different stories of displacement. The narrator attempts to decode the stories she’s learned in order to establish her own narrative. The book is grounded in short scenes that are written in prose. As Boat Stains is a coming to language as well as a coming to art and coming of age text, the narrator tries to interpret selfhood and family life by experimenting with form. The themes addressed in this quest to understand and to be understood include the chasm between personal and collective storytelling, the hush work of hiding inter-generational trauma, the impossibility of geographic and linguistic return, the compartmentalization of memory, the complexities of membership in transnational political struggle, and the pursuit of justice for self on the page.2999-01-0
Aiko Suzuki : Selected Works from 1973 to the Present
No full textIn this survey of Suzuki’s work from the 1970s to the present, Gagnon focuses on the extent to which it conveys bodily presence and relates it to other aspects of the artist's life, such as her Japanese-Canadian background, her position as a woman artist, and her love of jazz. Dault describes Suzuki’s work as a gestural suspension of energy, akin to haiku. Includes a detailed biographical chronology of the artist’s life and work. 8 bibl. ref
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