Cynthia Bolanos Flores Blog

Cynthia Bolanos Flores Cultural 6 Does My Head Look Big in This? Bibliography Abdel-Fattah, R. (2014). Does my head look big in this? London, England: Scholastic Childrens Books. Plot Summary Main character Amal is a 16 year old Muslim school girl. She has a happy household in which her mother wears a headscarf. As a high school student no one expected for her to want to wear a hijab. Amal wanted to show that she was proud of her faith and was inspired to follow what she believed in.   Though, the students are not as accepting about her choice. Critical Analysis One can see the obstacles that people of this culture face throughout the story. Amal knows she does not look like an Anglo. She is aware of misconceptions people have towards people of her culture. It is amazes me how there are women all over the world use head coverings, but due to appearances Amal encounter cultural backlash. Amal is spunky, but not everyone is equipped to deal with the bullying she h...

Bibliography Say, A. (1999). Tea with milk. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Plot Summary May has lived all her life in the states, it is her home for as long as she can remember. Her world turns upside down when after graduation she must move back with her parents to Japan, because they have grown homesick. In Japan everyone calls her Masako which is her birth name. However, to her it sounds live someone else. She must return to school to learn Japanese even though she has already graduated. Masako misses her home and struggles to make friends. Her family expects her to follow Japanese traditions, but Masako won’t have it. She leaves and finds a job in a nearby city and eventually finds a friend in a boy named Joseph. Critical Analysis The book has many cultural markers and demonstrates the hardships of being Japanese American.   May is used to a life in California and even though her heritage is Japanese she is immersed in an American form of life. This causes her to feel out...

Bibliography Lin, G. (2016). Where the mountain meets the moon. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Plot Summary Minli is a young girl living with her mother and father on Fruitless Mountain. They live in poverty, but her father is optimistic sadly her mother isn’t. Minli wants to make her mother happy so she sets out to find the old man on the moon in hopes of changing her family’s fortune. She hopes to reach Endless Mountain on the way she makes new friends and even finds a companion in a dragon. At the end she must decide to put her needs or the ones of others before her own wishes. Critical Analysis The story is a great representation of Asian Pacific literature. The story reminds me of Wizard of Oz on how the main character makes friends and experiences along the way. When one begins reading each chapter one is greeted with a wonderful picture in color. I could not find physical descriptions though the illustrations do a great job at portraying Asian characters and sy...

Bibliography Kadohata, C. (2014). The Thing about Luck. Atheneum Books for Young Readers. Plot Summary Summer and her family are just having a streak of bad luck. One after another bad event has affected them including Summer’s almost death experience with getting sick with malaria. This led Summer to have a paranoia for mosquitos. When her parents have to return to Japan to help sick elderly relatives Summer and her brother must go with her grandparents. Obaachan and Jiichan are very into the old ways. When the family runs into economic issues everyone must try and pull their own weight for the good of the family. However, Summer being so young has a lot on her shoulders. She worries about her brother making friends, trying to help Obaachan in the kitchen when she is feeling sick, and dealing with Jiichan’s expectations. Critical Analysis The story has characters that are real and relatable. The descriptions of settings are wonderfully made such as the wheat fields. As the...

Bibliography Young, E., & Koponen, L. (2011).The house Baba built: an artists childhood in China. New York: Little, Brown and Co. ISBN 0316076287 Plot Summary Eddie young and his family are caught up in the chaos of Word War II. His father worried for the families safety makes a deal with a landowner to design and built an expensive house if he allows the family to live there for a period of 20 years. The land in which the young engineer has in mind resides in a safe neighborhood near the foreign embassy. The landowner agrees and Baba takes his family to live in a safer neighborhood in a house he has built for them. Despite the war the kids are joyful and happy using their imaginations within the house their father has built. As the war grows closer relatives, friends, and foreigners found shelter in the home Baba had made. Critical Analysis During a trip to his past home Young decides to put his memories into this work of art. Ed Young’s The House that Baba Built...

The Round House Erdrich, L. (2012). The round house. HarperCollins. Plot Summary The mother of the main character Joe, is violently attacked near the reservation. This leads her husband and teenage son to try to seek justice and retribution each in their own way. His father is a judge in the reservations and is trying to find the offender. The case gets caught up due to a trouble in determining jurisdiction.   As the story continues the reader can see how Joe has to deal with the struggles and hardships of being a Native American. Joe and his father go through the story trying to fix their family and acquire justice. When Geraldine decides to testify the attacker is arrested only to be set free later. Joe takes it upon himself to punish the culprit. This results in him and his friend Cappy creating a plan to murder the offender. Critical Analysis This story of violence and revenge takes place around the 1980s on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. The book demon...