Watercress

Short and simple with lovely watercolor art. Watercress won the Caldecott Medal this year, too! Andrea Wang tells an autobiographical story of "harvesting" watercress out of a ditch on the side of the road in Ohio which her mom has spotted from their car. She is embarrassed and won't eat it at dinner, until her mom shares a painful story of growing up in China and losing her brother to starvation during the Great Famine (a disaster that I didn't know about until I read this book). So then 

I take a bite of the watercress and

it bites me back with its spicy, peppery taste.

It is delicate and 

slightly bitter,

like Mom's memories of home. 

 

Together,

we eat it

all

and make a 

new memory of 

watercress. 

The Last Cuentista

A dystopian novel! What joy! Apart from a couple re-reads of The House of the Scorpion and The Giver, this is the first dystopian novel I have read in decades . . . and I've missed them. In fact, I only own 5 Newberys (I don't like having a lot of books . . . that's what libraries are for!) and two of them are dystopians (the ones mentioned above). So, the genre alone had me hooked. 

Here is my recipe for The Last Cuentista:

2 cups Wall-E

1.5 cups The Giver

2/3 cup The House of the Scorpion

1 Tablespoon Interstellar 

1 teaspoon Nazis (pick any book depiction you like)

That's right; it's a space-travel dystopian novel with bad guys who champion same-ness and an ambiguous ending! 

Petra Peña, the protagonist, is really smart, resourceful, good at deceiving people and good at not getting caught. Like, too good at all those things. But the story wouldn't work if she wasn't, so I'll allow it. I mean, she has to pretend she's been brainwashed after 380 years in hyper-sleep and does a convincing job at age 13 while dealing with considerable personal trauma and loss? It's a stretch.

Like any futuristic dystopian story, I had a lot of questions. Is that what would really happen? Could a society like this really survive? Would those kids really have acted like that? Could the Collective really have changed their skin like that in just a few hundred years? How? What? What now?? But considering all these possibilities (and impossibilities) is really the reason these books are so appealing to me and The Last Cuentista did not disappoint, though I should note that this book will not be joining the ranks of my owned books.