A valuable tale that promotes multicultural education.
An Egyptian cat has pink fur, a colorful party hat and friends from around the world.
In this second book from author/illustrator Hill, Shyann celebrates her birthday. Her friends join Shyann and in the process teach readers simple birthday greetings in their native languages, along with birthday customs from their homelands. Daisy from Hawaii brings a calabash and a grass skirt and teaches Shyann the hula dance. A Brazilian guest, Martha, wears a flowing blue dancing dress and brings homemade fruit-shaped candy and paper flowers. Juan visits from Mexico and brings a piñata in the shape of a bull, filled with surprises. All the guests learn to say “Happy Birthday” in Arabic when Maya arrives, bringing Egyptian decorations, a tall, festive cake and a bracelet made from special stones. Tsehai brings a netala, explained as a traditional shawl, provides birthday greetings in Amharic and teaches an Ethiopian dance. Shyann’s German friend Tommy wears lederhosen and shares a German custom of a piling a chair with gifts, then dancing around it while singing. Shyann has another friend from Kenya, who brings greetings in Swahili, a dance and some Kenyan shillings. Finally, Lee arrives from China and bows to greet the assembled guests, fortune cookies in hand. Presented in verse form with no specific meter, It’s Your Birthday Shyann is fully and brightly illustrated, with a small map and flag included for each visitor, as well as basic instructions for the dances. Hill provides proper pronunciations and depicts each visitor in a traditional costume, teaching readers about many different cultures. While the bright illustrations lack sophistication, younger children aren’t likely to be bothered. Older readers may find the costumes and the introduction to other languages interesting and worthy of further study.
A valuable tale that promotes multicultural education.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-60402-867-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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