Skip to main content

Review: Uprooted

Image
By
Uprooted: A Memoir About What Happens When Your Family Moves Back
By Ruth Chan
New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2024. Comics. 285 pages.

In 1993, Ruth's parents tell her that her dad has found a new job, and so they will be moving from their home in Toronto, Canada back to Hong Kong. Ruth is apprehensive about the move. She loves her friends and life in Toronto, she isn't confident speaking in Cantonese, and her older brother is staying in Canada -- at a boarding school, so he can finish his senior year. Adjusting to life in Hong Kong is predictably difficult for Ruth. School is harder, the city is bigger, and she struggles to make friends. Meanwhile, her father is busy traveling throughout China for his new job, leaving Ruth without their nightly chats, and her mother is busy with her social life, now that she's back in her home country. How much can one 13-year-old be expected to endure?

Graphic novel memoirs have become a mainstay of the children's comics section, and this one will be especially popular. Ruth's story of migration is highlighted by memories from her parents of their own immigration from Hong Kong, and the family story of leaving China during the Sino-Japanese War. Filled with emotional depth and stories of perseverance, this story could easily feel really heavy. But Ruth Chan, who is well-known for her humorous picture books, adds a sense of laugh-out-loud humor that makes for a really complete feeling memoir. 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Review: Blood in the Water

By
Blood in the Water By Tiffany D. Jackson New York: Scholastic, 2025. Fiction. 255 pages. 12-year-old Kaylani McKinnon can't help but feel like a fish out of water. She's a Brooklyn girl spending her summer on Martha's Vineyard surrounded by wealthy family friends in their mansion. All she really wants is to stay home all summer where she her incarcerated father can easily reach her, and she can keep working to find ways to prove him innocent of fraud and embezzlement. Despite her protests, she finds herself on the island with the snooty granddaughters of her host. Soon after Kaylani's arrival, a popular teen boy is found murdered and she decides to conduct her own investigation. As she tries to discover what happened to Chadwick Cooper, Kaylani finds that not everything on Martha's Vineyard is as perfect as it appears. Thrillers for middle grade readers can be hard to find, but Tiffany D. Jackson succeeds in her first middle grade novel. A quick moving plot, tight d...
Post a Comment
Read more

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

By DeeDee
National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.
Post a Comment
Read more