As his last review before the book bunnies take off for the summer, Caramel chose Ingo by Helen Dunmore, originally published in 2005. As usual, Sprinkles is taking notes and asking questions.
Caramel reviews Ingo by Helen Dunmore.
Sprinkles: So Caramel, as we are getting ready to take off for the summer, you chose to talk about a book about the ocean.
Caramel: Yes. Ingo is about the ocean, that is true. But it is also about a lot more.
S: Tell me.
C: It is about a girl named Sapphire. Her father “mysteriously vanishes into the waves off the Cornwall coast where her family has always lived.” At least that is what the back of the book says.
S: Hmm, I thought you read the book.
C: I did. I thought it would be quicker to use the book’s own summary.
S: I guess that makes sense. But so her father disappears into the waves, does that mean he goes off swimming and does not come back?
C: Yes, almost. He goes sailing and does not come back. But before he disappears, he tells Sapphire about these people of the sea called the mer.
S: Like mermaids?
C: Yes, but they are called the mer, and they hate being called mermaids. They think the humans’ way of thinking about mermaids is silly.
S: That is interesting. I think there were some wild merpeople in one of the Harry Potter books.
C: Yeah I think you are right. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, there were merpeople too. But those were kind of vicious and almost evil. These mer are a lot less vicious and evil.
S: There were also some mer people in another book, one that you read, I think?
C: Yes. She goes looking for her dad and meets some mer. Before that, her brother Conor disappears for hours and does not remember what happened, or so he claims. It turns out that he was meeting with the mer. Conor and Sapphire make friends with two mer children, Faro and Elvira, who help them when some people get into trouble.
S: So the book is about Sapphire discovering the world of the mer and maybe finding her dad?
C: Well, she does not find her dad in this book. Apparently there are four other books after this one, and maybe she will find him, but in this book, she does learn about the mer and their world. It is called Ingo.
S: Oh, that is why the book is titled Ingo!
C: Yup. Ingo is the name of the underwater world that the mer live in.
S: That is interesting Caramel. So did you enjoy this book?
C: Yes. I even want to read the next four books.
S: I see. That is a good sign.
C: Yep, I’d say so!
S: Okay, so would you recommend this book to other young bunnies?
C: Yes! It is fun to imagine other worlds under the sea!
S: Cool! Okay, maybe this is a good time to wrap up this review, which is your last one before our summer break. What would you like to tell our readers Caramel?
C: Have a great summer and stay tuned for more book bunny reviews! We will be back in August with new books!
Caramel enjoyed reading Ingo by Helen Dunmore and recommends it to all little bunnies looking for an intriguing summer read.
Sprinkles reviews The Death of the Hat: A Brief History of Poetry in Fifty Objects by Paul B. Janeczko and Chris Raschka.
The Death of the Hat: A Brief History of Poetry in Fifty Objects is an interesting collection. The title might give you a hint about what to expect: you might imagine that this will likely be a collection of fifty poems each about a particular object, and the whole collection will likely give us a sense of the history of poetry. And you would be right, mostly.
So yes, most of the poems are about concrete objects, like a hat (the titular poem “The Death of the Hat” by Billy Collins) or a just-finishing candle (a poem by Rumi) or simply the letter E, my favorite (by George Gordon, Lord Byron, who just happens to be the father of Ada Lovelace):
A Riddle, On the Letter E by George Gordon, Lord Byron
The beginning of eternity, the end of time and space The beginning of every end, and the end of every place.
But there are also quite a few poems which are about nature and natural beings. You can call them objects, sure, but I feel like they do not quite fit the term. Like snowflakes (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), the midnight frost (Basho), the sun (Ben Jonson), an eagle (Lord Alfred Tennyson), and so on. Still, they are concrete, and I suppose, do make a category that excludes topics like spirituality, romantic love, meaning of life and so on.
Sprinkles is reading The Death of the Hat: A Brief History of Poetry in Fifty Objects by Paul B. Janeczko and Chris Raschka.
The history bit is worth mentioning. The time periods are described at the beginning; the curator of the collection, Paul B. Janeczko, in his introduction gives us a quick recap of the history of Western poetry, mainly focusing on what can be gleaned in poetry written in English. This is helpful and provides the reader some guidelines as they dive into the book. But then we find several poems that were translated into English! Now this is exciting, the poems are all exquisite themselves, but assigning to them the Euro-centric (or rather English-centric) period names feels a bit off then. For example, when you are reading poems from “the Renaissance”, you do not expect to find Basho from Japan, Emperor Le Thanh Tong from Vietnam or Kim Ku from Korea. The timelines work of course (1500s-late 1600s), and I was really excited by the diversity of the poets in the book. But the time period names still disoriented me a bit.
The book is a delight nonetheless, and I recommend it highly to any bunnies young or old. Especially if you want to enjoy some beautiful poetry in company of inspiring water colored sketches on each page. The illustrations by Chris Raschka definitely add an extra something to the book, sometimes whimsical, sometimes elegant, but always interesting, to each page. All in all, a wonderful collection to be read and savored.
Sprinkles enjoyed reading The Death of the Hat: A Brief History of Poetry in Fifty Objects by Paul B. Janeczko and Chris Raschka and recommends it to all current and future lovers of poetry, young and not-so-young.
Last summer Caramel read several books on Asian myths and legends. Today he is talking to Sprinkles about one of these: Japanese Myths, Legends and Folktales: Bilingual English and Japanese Edition, written by Yuri Yasuda, illustrated by Yoshinobu Sakakura and Eiichi Mitsui, and published in 2019.
Caramel reviews Japanese Myths, Legends, and Folktales by Yuri Yasuda.
Sprinkles: So Caramel, this is one of your last reviews before we take off for the summer. What do you want to talk about today?
Caramel: It’s this book on Japanese myths and legends. I like all of the nice stories, and the pictures. The colors are nice.
S: You are right, there are a lot of illustrations in this book. Each page has at least one. And they are very stylized. That is, they all kind of fit in one style, they resemble one another in some ways.
C: That makes sense though. It is all the same people who drew them. So it makes sense they would look like one another.
S: True.
C: And they are all very colorful and they use some really cool drawing techniques!
S: That is a good observation Caramel! I agree with you! Now tell me a bit more about the stories.
C: There are twelve stories. Each of them takes about three to five pages, usually below ten. On each page there is a picture or two, and then the top of the page is in English. And in the second half of the page the story is in Japanese.
S: Oh, part of the book is in Japanese then! I guess it makes sense: the book is subtitled “The Bilingual Edition” after all.
C: Well, actually, it’s called, “Bilingual English and Japanese Edition”.
S: Thank you for the correction Caramel. That makes total sense. But you don’t know how to read in Japanese. Was that okay?
C: Well, I don’t know how to read in Japanese YET. But yes, it was more than okay. It was cool to see the difference in the writing. Japanese people use a different alphabet than us. Or rather three different writing systems. I looked it up. There is a long Wikipedia article about it. And we tried to learn a bit of Japanese last summer. It is hard but it is also a lot of fun. I loved using the brush pens!
S: Yes, that was a lot of fun! And you are so right in saying that you don’t know it YET. You are still such a young bunny, maybe you will learn it at some point.
C: I hope so. I especially want to play more with the brush pens, mostly the pens.
S: Sounds like a plan to me!
Caramel is reading Japanese Myths, Legends, and Folktales by Yuri Yasuda.
S: Okay, so let us get back to the stories. You said there are twelve of them. So tell us a bit about a couple of them. Maybe your favorites?
C: I liked the first one, “The Tongue-Cut Sparrow”. It’s about a kind old man who finds an injured sparrow and saves it. One day as he is out doing something, the sparrow eats the house flour, so the old man’s wife cuts the sparrow’s tongue off as punishment, and the sparrow flies off. Then on another day, the old man goes walking, and he meets the sparrow again. The old man was always kind to the bird, so the sparrow offers him some gifts. The old man takes the smaller gift and walks home to find that it has money. But his wife is not a nice person and she is greedy too so she gets upset that her husband did not get the bigger gift. So the next day she takes off to find the sparrow and asks for the bigger gift. The sparrow gives her the bigger gift and tells her not to open it until she is home. But she does open it before she gets home, and the demons inside the box attack her. Finally the old kind man finds her and saves her and the wife apologizes for being mean and unkind and they all forgive each other and live happily ever after.
S: Hmm. What do you think the story means?
C: I think the moral of the story is that if you are given a gift, and told not to open it till home, then you should not open it till home.
S: I can see how that could be one of the messages you get. Anything else?
C: You should not be selfish or greedy? And ask for the bigger gift? Bigger is not always better.
S: That too could be a good lesson.
C: Yes, and maybe being kind is always a good thing? The old man was kind to the bird and he was rewarded for it even though he was not being kind to get a reward.
S: All true. Very good Caramel! I like these messages! And apparently this is a well-known story. There is even a Wikipedia article on it.
C: I am not surprised. The book is supposed to be about myths and legends, and those are probably all well known.
S: You do have a good point there Caramel. Can you tell us the names of some of the other stories?
C: Here is the full list: The Strong Boy, The Marriage of a Mouse, The Fisherman and the Tortoise, The Luminous Princess, The Peach Boy, The Kachi Kachi Mountain, The Old Man With Wens, The Old Man Who Made Trees Blossom, The One-Inch Boy, The Lucky Cauldron, and The Monkey-and-Crab Fight.
S: What is that last one about?
C: There is a crab who wants some peaches and asks for help from a monkey but the monkey cheats him and steals all the peaches.
S: So these stories are somewhat different from the fairy tales you grew up with, right?
C: Yes very much so. There are lessons to learn in these too, but sometimes the lessons are a bit harder to see.
S: Maybe because we did not grow up in Japan, the cultural context is not as transparent to us.
C: Maybe. But I really liked these stories. They are all somewhat different but also very interesting. Kind of surprising and definitely fun to read.
S: So I am guessing you would not mind it if other young bunnies read this book too?
C: Mind it? Of course not. In fact I would say they should read it. And maybe also look at the pictures and also the Japanese text below. I will learn how to read it one day, hopefully.
S: Sounds like a good goal, Caramel. Okay, this is a good time to wrap up this review. What do you want to tell our readers?
C: Stay tuned for more book bunny reviews!
Caramel enjoyed reading Japanese Myths, Legends, and Folktales by Yuri Yasuda and recommends it to all curious little bunnies who want to learn about the many different stories young bunnies around the world grow up with.
Today Marshmallow chose to review a beautiful book of infographics by David McCandless published in 2022, aptly named Beautiful News: Positive Trends, Uplifting Stats, Creative Solutions.
Marshmallow reviews Beautiful News: Positive Trends, Uplifting Stats, Creative Solutions by David McCandless.
Marshmallow’s Quick Take: If you want hope (or if you simply like pretty pictures displaying lots of cool information), then this is the book for you!
Marshmallow’s Summary (with Spoilers): In today’s status quo, things are looking grim. Everyday everyone looks at the news and sees only darkness. Every headline promises impending doom, but each one is terrifying in its own separate way. Isn’t it great!?! More seriously though, this is a daily occurrence that everyone, regardless of the news and media type they consume (CNBC, CNN, Fox, New York Times… they are all extremely depressing), experiences. This is mostly due to a phenomenon known as negativity bias. But no matter how natural, the end result is universal hopelessness and—quite frankly—rampant depression. Birth rates are falling as youth start to equate having children to condemning them to a horrific future. But amidst this barrage of fear, sadness, and anger (all of which is undeniably present and must be recognized), there is also hope. Hope may initially feel like a fragile concept, but this book helps back it up with statistics and data.
The author David McCandless has compiled exactly what is written on the first page: “positive trends, uplifting stats, creative solutions.” After the table of contents, each page or two is a spread of data, with brilliant colors and clear infographics (a portmanteau word smashing together “information” and “graphics”). The book is divided into sections based on what topic the information is about. The sections are titled as follows: health, cleaner energy, progress, climate, money, nice!, nature, mixed, freedom and rights, women and girls, what to do?, and cool tech.
Every page in this book is bright and cheery and truly provides reasons to stay hopeful. For example, one beautiful graph shows that “Far More Unites Us Than Divides Us.” Apparently, between countries, 84% is the percent average similarity in common values between groups. Between religions, it’s 91%; between rich and poor, and between education levels, and between age groups, it’s 96%. Between genders, it’s 97%. This is just one example from the more-than-200 pages in this book! At the end, there is also a map of the world and each country is labeled with something that makes it special and good. This book truly is a candle—like the author’s name—in the dark.
Marshmallow is reading Beautiful News: Positive Trends, Uplifting Stats, Creative Solutions by David McCandless.
Marshmallow’s Review: I love this book! I have read so many amazing books, but this is my favorite one because it really embodies hope. I think I will definitely return to this book over and over again. If you can’t tell, I would highly recommend this book. I think it is great to read for oneself, but I think it could also make an amazing gift to a worried friend or source material to comfort them with facts to prove that there is always hope. (Here is one of my other favorite books about hope: I have already reviewed it for this blog. That was more of a narrative of hope however. This book just gives you proof! Colorful visuals and data! What more could one ask for?)
I was very small when I decided that hope is something one should always have, even when it seems false. What’s the point in giving up? Nothing is ever absolute. I think this book is really good because it shows that you don’t even need to follow that stubborn logic. There are reasons to have hope already.
I think everyone should be given a copy of this book. The only problem is that, being written 2022, the data is not the most recent. But the fact that most show trends of even longer periods of time is still encouraging. This can’t fix all existential dread or depression, but it can spark a bit of hope that can be nursed into a flame.
On this topic, if you cannot read this book for any reason, try visiting the Good News Network—an American online newspaper that focuses on good news only. So, in summary, I would highly recommend reading this book and treasuring it forever… but I would recommend keeping hope even more.
Marshmallow’s Rating: 150%. Yes, I am that excited about this book!
Marshmallow rates Beautiful News: Positive Trends, Uplifting Stats, Creative Solutions by David McCandless 150%!
