"Shanghai summers were long, hot, and humid—and as the war went on, the pool became too expensive to fill. So we spent the long summer days in the shade of the garden, with the shrill, hissing cicadas. They sang in unison whenever the sun reached them. Some of us read books from our family library or played cards and board games. [My brother] Hardy and I trained and fought our crickets."
from artist Ed Young's beautiful autobiographical book The House Baba Built: An Artist's Childhood in China (Little, Brown, 2011. Text as told to Libby Koponen.)
The scrapbook-style, multimedia (collages incorporating photographs, sketches, cut paper, and more) picture book, set during the World War II years, stays focused on its subject: a family's strength and resilience. Highly recommended.
I love the idea of having fighting crickets, somehow. I am just bewildered as to how one would MAKE them fight...~!
I love the cover of this - gorgeous, and the writing, too.
Posted by: tanita | October 10, 2011 at 04:07 AM
Tanita, in a postscript Young says that only when he was working on the book did he realize that his father had made the sturdy roof, which the kids loved to roller-skate on, thick enough to withstand bombing. Wow. Talk about foresight.
Posted by: Susan T. | October 12, 2011 at 01:22 PM