I have posted these reviews before. But, since Spring Festival happens every year (It’s this coming Monday, February 8th, this year), I decided maybe this post should too.
In years past, I’ve scoured websites and bookshelves for every Chinese New Year/Spring Festival themed kids’ book around to read to our clan in anticipation of the holiday. We found some good ones and some not so good ones. Overthinker that I am, I hope my musings help you decide which ones are worthwhile for your clan.
No Year of the Cat from Sleeping Bear Press is a familiar folk story about the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac and why there is no cat among them. It all starts with the emperor needing a way to remember time, when things happened, most notably the year the prince was born. His idea to name the years after animals results in a race with the winning animals making it into the ranks of becoming legacies in the calendar. Cute story and really beautiful illustrations.
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Chelsea’s Chinese New Year explains Chinese New Year for the younger set. I love the size of it–a nice big paperback book (about a 9 1/2″ square) with big ole illustrations very similar in style to the Disney Channel’s Charlie and Lola. The main character, little Chelsea, explains how her Chinese American family celebrate Chinese New Year, touching on all the traditions either in the text or illustrations. Each page has a little section that gives additional information about the holiday that you can choose to read or skip over to just keep it a story. This one would be great to use in a classroom to read aloud to a group of preschoolers or kindergarteners.
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Marcia Vaughan’s The Dancing Dragon has simplistic text about how Chinese New Year is celebrated in Chinatown. But, what makes this book worthwhile is that the pages all unfold accordion style to reveal the illustration of a long dragon from the parade. Good one to read to a classroom of kids since you could have a child hold each page as it unfolds. Just wish the book was a little larger in size. At 9″x7.5″, a couple more inches would make it much better.
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Another preschool friendly one, Joan Holub’s Dragon Dance: A Chinese New Year Lift-the-Flap Book is a popular one. Each page has 4 lines of simple text in a classic ABCB rhyming pattern (hope that’s right…trying to remember 7th grade English class) with good sized flaps to open to reveal some part of the New Year celebration, supposedly one in New York City’s Chinatown (though it wouldn’t have to be). Colorful and bold illustrations include little “extras” you can point out–the significance of the flowers, the oranges, and the super long noodles. Only complaint? The last flap ends with “Gung Hat Fat Choy!” in big ole print which is Cantonese rather than the Mandarin “Xin Nian Kuai Le!” New Year’s greeting – something that really bothered my Mandarin-learning kiddos.
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Rivers-Moore and Davis’ Chinese New Year! Create and Celebrate is new this year since it just came out this past fall. It had me at the spiral binding. It starts off with a cute little story and then has loads of pages of fun stuff to do—add fire and smoke to a dragon, trace Chinese characters, find the matching lanterns, guess which red envelope has the most coins, learn to draw a pagoda. It even has two punch out red envelopes and a bunch of fun stickers. You may want to buy this one and then rebuy it the next year…or maybe the authors will create a new edition with some new activities which would be very cool.
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It’s not easy to make a new story out of a classic one. In Goldy Luck and the Three Pandas, the author did that out of…can you guess the classic story? The story takes place during Spring Festival, and Little Goldy’s mother sends her to wish their panda neighbors a happy new year and deliver a plate of traditional turnip cakes. What follows is a familiar set of events with a silly twists that will make your little ones giggle. It’s a fun book and one that can teach about CNY traditions and Chinese culture in simple and entertaining ways as well as open up conversation about friendship and mercy. A recipe for turnip cakes is included at the end that I haven’t been brave enough to try to make yet, but it’s on my to-do list! (Note: one page of my copy has a typo. It looks like a line of text is missing. I called the publisher and am waiting to hear if this is the case in every copy of the book or maybe just one batch.)
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Despite mediocre illustrations, Bella and the Year of the Dragon is the best book I could find explaining the fable behind all the animals of the Chinese zodiac and their race to the emperor to determine what order they would come in for the years of the Chinese lunar calendar. And, believe me, I read a bunch that were not even worthy of a review. This one, however, does a good job explaining the fable simply but in an interesting way.
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