Skip to main content

Review: Chinese Menu

Image
By

By Grace Lin
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2023. Informational. 288 pages.

Have you ever wanted to know more about the food that you find at a Chinese restaurant? This book, which is laid out like a takeout menu with sections for tea, appetizers, soups, and "chef's specials," tells the stories behind more than twenty Chinese dishes. Some of the foods have stories based in folklore, in mythology, in historical fact, and all are shared with vivid detail. Each section includes the author explaining a little about the dish and her personal connection to it before digging into the origin story behind our feast. Line drawings and full-color gouache images bring the stories and foods to life. 

This is an ambitious kind of project and it pays off. The resulting book is highly unique and very special. The resulting spread of dishes examines Chinese culture, Chinese folklore, and even relates to the history of Chinese Americans --touching on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Gold Rush, and even Henry Kissinger's secret visit to China. If you think this may be a lot for a child audience, you'd probably be right. But the layout of this book is perfect for treasuring as a family keepsake and revisiting favorite dishes as part of your takeout order. If you read this book hungry, you may end up with your biggest ever takeout order --but it will be so, so worth it.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Fowl Play

By
  Fowl Play By Kristin O'Donnell Tubb New York: Katherine Tegen Books, 2024. Fiction 277 pages. Still reeling from her beloved uncle's death, Chloe Alvarez is comforted and confused when at his last will and testament reading, Uncle Will gifts her his African Grey parrot, Charlie. Charlie has a robust vocabulary and loves to make Alexa requests for her favorite songs, but when she starts saying things like, "homicide," and "cyanide," Chloe becomes convinced that Uncle Will may have met his demise by murder instead of a genetic disease, as was previously thought. Ultimately, bringing in her brother, Grammy, and Uncle Frank (and of course Charlie,) Chloe's ragtag and adoring family support her search for answers ---going on stakeouts, engaging in fast pursuits, and searching for clues. But as the suspects stack up and the mystery grows, Chole will learn that the process of death and grieving is complicated, and in the end her Uncle Will's words that, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Five Faves: Picture Books About Wolves

By
There are a lot of great picture books that have wolves in them. Wolves are beautiful, strong creatures that can also represent scary things (like in the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood). Here are five great new-ish picture books that feature wolves, for those kids who love to howl at the moon.  Full Moon Pups  Written by Liz Garton Scanlon  Illustrated by Chuck Groenink  New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2023. Picture Book. This is a beautifully illustrated story about a pack of new wolf pups and how they grow over the course of one moon’s cycle, from full moon to new moon and back again. Readers will see how the new pups don’t open their eyes for days, how they start to explore the world around them, and how the older members of the pack take care of them. The book also includes information about the phases of the moon at the end.  Little Good Wolf  By Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel  Boston: Clarion Books, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more