chu, chu! (giddy-up!)

Ted and Betsy Lewin

Horse Song: The Naadam of Mongolia

Lee and Low, 2008

  The gorgeous illustration on the first-page, imitating an exotic and well-browsed book, tells us that we are about to enter another world. Horse Song records in vivid words and images Ted and Betsy Lewin's journey to Mongolia to witness the Nadaam festival. The festival features a race in which middle-school-aged children ride semi-wild horses fourteen miles in the Gobi desert. Through the Lewins' travelogue we enter in the everyday rhythms of Mongolian life, like making curds from mare's milk, and hear of common dreams like winning the horse race. We learn about cultural expectations as when we squeeze alongside the Lewins into a tent so as to accept the hospitality offered us; and we experience in the curious gazes of our Mongolian hosts ourselves as Other. And, of course, there is the horse race, and there is no escape from a narrative that accelerates to a full-gallop finish. 

  The book marvelously transports us to another culture on another continent, and we hope one day to make use of the extra facts and the glossary the Lewins share with us.

Martial art

Carol Nevius (author) 

Bill Thomson (illustrator)

Karate Hour

Marshall Cavendish, 2004

Carol Nevius' couplets take us through an hour-long karate class, beginning with the students' bow. They stretch, practice forms, focus their minds, take turns sparring, chant in unison, and with feelings of pride and accomplishment return to their parents. Bill Thomson's illustrations are superlative (is he, therefore, a martial artist?). Cropped views and extreme angles capture and focus our attention dramatically. To take just one example, the picture of stretching uses extreme fore-shortening to stretch our vision from an enormous foot looming before our mouse-eye view to the distant right foot that the young karate student grasps. The author's note includes more information about the history and practice of karate (not being an expert, I can't comment on accuracy here), but the book, with its photo-realism-style images of kids of different races, shapes, and genders, is clearly focused on American children's experience  of this imported discipline.

sumo attitude

Hirotaka Nakagawa's Sumo Boy with the help of Yoshifumi Hasegawa's art brut illustration style delivers his moves with brash panache. The boy-saves-girl-from-mean-nasty-bully plot is about a lean (and conventional and gender stereotyped) as it gets, but the colorful, urban spectacles are a feast for the eyes. Hasegawa gives us in rough black outlines and bold raucous colors the pageantry of Japan's national sport, the cheek-by-jowl city highrises, and the interior of a crowded noodle shop. If you were not already a fan of Japanese pop culture, it is not too late to answer Sumo Boy's clarion call, "Dosukoi!" Note: check your issues about gender equality and desires for peaceful conflict resolution at the door.

Hirotaka Nakagawa (author) and Yoshifumi Hasegawa (illustrator)
Sumo Boy
Hyperion, 2006