The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto – An inspiring, bilingual children’s book about togetherness & gardening – #bookreview

 

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The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto

Diane de Anda

Oksana Kemarskaya (illustrations)

(Piñata Books, hardcover)

 

The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto is a warm, inspiring tale of family and neighborhood togetherness and how a simple idea can grow and spread, starting with a grandmother’s fond memories and a young child’s energetic wish.

Nicely illustrated with gouache paintings by Canadian artist Oksana Kemarskaya, The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto is printed in English and Spanish. While the corresponding paragraphs are displayed on the same page, they are kept separate by small graphics that make it easier to read the book straight through in one language. At the same time, readers of Spanish who are learning English and English readers who are learning Spanish can easily compare how something is stated in both languages.

Published in 2013, The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto recently has received a Skipping Stone Honor Award from Skipping Stones: An International Multicultural Magazine, one of only 22 books named to receive the award. The book also was one of ten titles named an Honor Book in the 2014 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People competition.

Piñata Books is an imprint of Arte Público Press, which is based at the University of Houston and describes itself as “the nation’s largest and most established publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by U.S. Hispanic authors.”

The author of  The Patchwork Garden / Pedacitos de huerto, Diane de Anda, is a UCLA professor and author of several bilingual books for children, as well as other works. Her book’s Spanish translations are by Gabriela Baeza Ventura.

Ukraine-native Oksana Kemarskaya has illustrated numerous books for children, including Planet Earth Projects and the Secret Lives of Plants.

— Si Dunn

 

 

 

 

 

Pale Blue Light – Civil War fiction, with espionage and plenty of action – #bookreview

 

Pale Blue Light

Skip Tucker

(NewSouth Books – paperback, Kindle)

 

Alabama novelist Skip Tucker has taken a still-lively Civil War controversy and expanded it into an imaginative tale that blends historical fiction with murder mystery, spy vs. spy, and plenty of action.

Tucker’s protagonist, Rabe Canon, is a general in the Confederacy’s Black Horse Cavalry. He also is a man unafraid to engage in dangerous missions and individual heroics, especially when he is astride, or close by, his big, well-trained horse, Hammer.

When Canon is sent on a special mission that could possibly help save the South from defeat, the story flows from the Civil War’s eastern battlefields to gold-rich San Francisco and back again, and Canon gets into fights for his life at almost every stop.

This lively, entertaining novel unfolds like a movie. Indeed, Pale Blue Light could make an excellent movie worthy of a John Wayne-style, action-hero star, if anyone in Hollywood is paying attention.

— Si Dunn

 

Hadacol Days: A Southern Boyhood – A fine look at what it was like to grow up in the ’40s & ’50s – #memoir #bookreview

 

Hadacol Days: A Southern Boyhood

Clyde Bolton

(NewSouth Books, hardcover, Kindle)

 

There is much to like in this enjoyable book, especially if you, your parents or your grandparents grew up somewhere in the American South in the 1940s, 1950s, or even the early 1960s.

The “Hadacol” of the book’s title was a patent medicine marketed by a Louisiana politician as a vitamin-rich health tonic in the Forties and Fifties. It contained 12% alcohol as a “preservative” and soon became coveted, particularly in dry counties in the rural South, as a way to get around legal and moral bans on consuming alcoholic drinks.

The author of “Hadacol Days,” now a well-known retired sports journalist, grew up the son of a railroad employee who moved his family frequently all over the Southeastern U.S.

Clyde Bolton’s childhood memories are tinged with having to change towns, schools and friends with distressing frequency. He writes: “I grew up in Williamston, Greenville, Edgemoor, Chester, Greenwood, and Clinton in South Carolina, Lawrenceville, Atlanta, Tucker, Statham, and Winder in Georgia, and Gadsden, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Trussville in Alabama.” But many of his best childhood memories happened in Statham, Georgia, “a place that holds my heart in a snare as tender and secure today as it was when it caught me in 1948.”

Many of the activities and coming-of-age events Bolton wonderfully recalls will be recognized by almost anyone who grew up mid-20th-century America. It was a time when the world seemed much safer and children were afforded more freedom to roam about, day or night, and have growing-up adventures in their neighborhoods, downtowns and nearby woodlands.

As I read Bolton’s book, many of my own childhood memories came back and meshed easily with his descriptions of being an inept Scout, building model airplanes, playing baseball and other sports, getting teeth accidentally knocked out, doing stupid stunts on bicycles, listening to radio dramas, and hearing relatives describe  how tough their lives had been in the Great Depression.

Hadacol Days is nostalgic entertainment at some of its very best.

— Si Dunn

 

Click here to get Hadacol Days: hardcover edition, Kindle edition

 

http://amzn.to/1juabUS