Illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault
2011, Groundwood Books
32 pages
Rating: 4
Endpapers: Flying
Goose quilt, red/pink background
Title Page: White
with flying goose triangles flying…
Illustrations:
simple, watercolors or watercolor pencils?
Setting: Contemporary America, places where migrant farm workers live and shop.
1st sentence/s: “There are times when Anna feels like a
bird. It is the birds, after all, that
fly north in the spring and south every fall, chasing the sun, following the
warmth.”
OSS: Anna and her
large German-speaking Mennonite family live in Mexico, but travel north each
year when it is time to labor on the farms.
The story uses a lot of “snazzy” figurative language…perhaps
even a tiny, tiny bit too much. Filled
with metaphor, similes, and lovely descriptions, the story definitely does
appeal to the senses and the imagination.
I will definitely use this book in my classroom when
teaching figurative language, especially similes and metaphors.
“At night Anna is a kitten sharing a bed with her
sisters, all of them under one blanket when the nights are cool. A kitten is a good thing to be, a safe thing,
curled there with your sisters by your side.”
When you look at the illustrations, you know that the
characters are not Hispanic. After the
halfway point, you see the family lined up to go into a store, and you see the
kerchiefs covering the female heads, the overalls, simple shirts, and hats
covering the males heads. Then she mentions them speaking German, “….the good
plain German rolling off their tongues as sweetly as sugar.” But it’s not until the two-page afterward
that you learn the particulars about the Mennonite workers that moved to Mexico
in the 1920’s to become migrant workers, keeping their Canadian citizenship.
Really interesting!
A great book to share when teaching about Mexico. This was all totally new to me!
About the author:
a writer from Newfoundland, she wrote this story after meeting
Mennonites from Mexico when she was visiting in Ontario.
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