Skipping Stone Award 2010
Selected for the 2009/2010 Great Lakes Great Books Award ballot for grades 6–8.
Editor's Choice Award, Library Media Connection
"Chen Jiang Hong was a small boy when this tumultuous period began, and in these illustrated pages he captures the bewildering cruelties wreaked on the people of his neighborhood in a northern Chinese city. [...] What makes this memoir especially interesting - and thought-provoking - is the way Chen conveys the consuming political hysteria of the time: Having witnessed the awful acts on Mao's cultural shock troops, the boy was nonetheless thrilled when, at 8, he was finally old enough to wear the armband of the Little Red Guard." - Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal
“In its excellence in representing political upheaval through the eyes of a child, this book belongs next to Peter Sís’s The Wall; in its directness, next to the work of Allen Say. The indefatigable energy of Chen’s brush, though, is all his own.” – Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"This powerful work joins [the] growing list of outstanding memoirs about the ear." - School Library Journal, Starred Review
"The beautifully detailed, somber ink and watercolor paintings vibrantly capture 1960s China from a child's perspective, and the generous page size allows Chen free reign in laying out and sequencing his images: half a dozen small paintings of ration tickets and scarce foodstuffs along the top of one page, for example, or a dizzying panorama of crowds at a rally sprawling across two others. The prose is lean and elegant, but the story it recounts is hardly bedtime material. With this intensely personal family history, Chen moves into Art Spiegelman territory, marking Mao and Me as a Cultural Revolution counterpart to Maus, slighter and more understated but with a similar emotional punch." - Jing Daily
"Chen Jiang Hong combines his skills as author and illustrator in this exquisite tale of his own childhood in China. Through simple prose and traditional Chinese style of art, the author reveals seemingly innocent details of a child’s life during the Cultural Revolution. The underlying story is both revealing and heartbreaking, its elegant subtlety drawing shivers down the reader’s spine.
Marketed as a children’s book, Mao and Me is so much more than an entertaining story. The watercolor illustrations set the tone for the narrative, their crisp details a sharp contrast to the spare words that reveal the tragedy of the larger story. This is a book that should be read by parents and children together, so that the unspoken history can be elaborated. Mao and Me, while describing life at a particular time in a particular place, is also a cautionary tale for every culture and generation." - Deborah Adams, Curled Up With a Good Kid's Book
Skipping Stone Award 2010
Selected for the 2009/2010 Great Lakes Great Books Award ballot for grades 6–8.
Editor's Choice Award, Library Media Connection
"Chen Jiang Hong was a small boy when this tumultuous period began, and in these illustrated pages he captures the bewildering cruelties wreaked on the people of his neighborhood in a northern Chinese city. [...] What makes this memoir especially interesting - and thought-provoking - is the way Chen conveys the consuming political hysteria of the time: Having witnessed the awful acts on Mao's cultural shock troops, the boy was nonetheless thrilled when, at 8, he was finally old enough to wear the armband of the Little Red Guard." - Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal
“In its excellence in representing political upheaval through the eyes of a child, this book belongs next to Peter Sís’s The Wall; in its directness, next to the work of Allen Say. The indefatigable energy of Chen’s brush, though, is all his own.” – Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"This powerful work joins [the] growing list of outstanding memoirs about the ear." - School Library Journal, Starred Review
"The beautifully detailed, somber ink and watercolor paintings vibrantly capture 1960s China from a child's perspective, and the generous page size allows Chen free reign in laying out and sequencing his images: half a dozen small paintings of ration tickets and scarce foodstuffs along the top of one page, for example, or a dizzying panorama of crowds at a rally sprawling across two others. The prose is lean and elegant, but the story it recounts is hardly bedtime material. With this intensely personal family history, Chen moves into Art Spiegelman territory, marking Mao and Me as a Cultural Revolution counterpart to Maus, slighter and more understated but with a similar emotional punch." - Jing Daily
"Chen Jiang Hong combines his skills as author and illustrator in this exquisite tale of his own childhood in China. Through simple prose and traditional Chinese style of art, the author reveals seemingly innocent details of a child’s life during the Cultural Revolution. The underlying story is both revealing and heartbreaking, its elegant subtlety drawing shivers down the reader’s spine.
Marketed as a children’s book, Mao and Me is so much more than an entertaining story. The watercolor illustrations set the tone for the narrative, their crisp details a sharp contrast to the spare words that reveal the tragedy of the larger story. This is a book that should be read by parents and children together, so that the unspoken history can be elaborated. Mao and Me, while describing life at a particular time in a particular place, is also a cautionary tale for every culture and generation." - Deborah Adams, Curled Up With a Good Kid's Book
Chen's (Little Eagle) picture book memoir of growing up during the Cultural Revolution is not easy to read, but stands out for its epic sweep and unflinching honesty. Rendered in large panels, his ink and wash paintings document everything from the making of dumplings to the public humiliation of cherished neighbors. The early pages are a testament to the quiet devotion of his grandparents; as Mao's revolution takes hold, Chen's father is sent to the Russian border for reeducation, food becomes scarce, and the family lives surrounded by fear. Nevertheless, beauty appears in unexpected places, as when foreigners pass through town and Chen and his sister smell perfume for the first time: "As an adult, I have brought her perfume from Paris many times, hoping that one would allow her to rediscover the exotic smell from our childhood, but none has been right." In its excellence in representing political upheaval through the eyes of a child, this book belongs next to Peter Sís's The Wall; in its directness, next to the work of Allen Say. The indefatigable energy of Chen's brush, though, is all his own. Ages 6-10. (Dec.)
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Gr 5-8
When the Cultural Revolution began, the author was a three-year-old living in a northern city. Cared for by his grandparents, he and his two sisters led a quiet, orderly life. His older sister, whom he describes as a deaf mute, taught her siblings to sign and Hong to draw. One day they heard on the radio that Mao had declared a Cultural Revolution, and life began to change. The text tells a straightforward story of the years between 1966 and 1976, while the illustrations shed a strong light on these years through the eyes of one child. Hong's world is presented in various shades of khaki, beige, and gray with color often used to draw viewers' eyes to the individuality of the people, or, in the case of red, to the dominance of the Communist party. The illustrations are full of the details of everyday life: how to make dumplings, the foods they could buy with ration tickets, life in the schoolroom, and the furnishings in the family apartment. But above all, the pictures, with their intense black line drawings, convey strong emotion-the almost inhuman face of a Red Guard who inspects their apartment, Hong crying in bed as his father packs to leave for re-education in the country, his grandmother's sadness when her husband dies and, later, when the Red Guards slaughter her beloved chickens. This powerful work joins Song Nan Zhang's A Little Tiger in the Chinese Night: An Autobiography in Art (Tundra, 1995) and Ange Zhang's Red Land, Yellow River: A Story from the Cultural Revolution (Groundwood, 2004) on a growing list of outstanding memoirs about the era.-Barbara Scotto, Children's Literature New England, Brookline, MA
