The Magic Brush

K-Gr 2—When Jasmine and Tai-Tai's grandfather comes to live with them in the spring, he begins to teach Jasmine how to write Chinese characters in the traditional way with brush and inkstone. As they write, Agong weaves the words into a slight but pleasant magical story that they revisit day after day. In the fall, Agong dies, and Jasmine misses him greatly. Eventually she begins to teach her younger brother the Chinese characters, beginning with the one for grandfather. The story is sweet and will appeal to children and their parents, but as an introduction to Chinese characters, it may be somewhat misleading. The character for "grandfather" is accurate, but the pinyin word "agong" is not a Mandarin word commonly used for "grandfather." Traditional characters are used throughout, though the majority are identical to the simplified ones used across China today. More problematic is the distortion of the characters in the illustrations. A note explains that this is often done with paper cutouts, which are "symbolic representations...showing the inspiration from where the character design came." While native Chinese speakers would undoubtedly recognize the characters that are part of the attractive cut-paper collages, young children new to the written language could find them confusing. Imaginative visual play with characters has been done beautifully in Christoph Niemann's The Pet Dragon (HarperCollins/Greenwillow, 2008) where the written characters imposed on the illustrations remain true to their form. That book might be a better choice for children beginning a study of the language.—Barbara Scotto, Children's Literature New England, Brookline, MA