Bookbird 1 / 2024

Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, Vol. 62, No. 1, 2024
 

Finding Hope in Children’s Books

Following an issue on ‘War and Displacement’ (Bookbird 61.3, 2023), it is fitting that ‘Finding Hope in Children’s Books’ is the theme for Bookbird 62.1. The opening article sets the tone, demonstrating how young adult literature, by subverting the storms and stresses of adolescence, can result in empowerment. How an award-winning novel counteracts the disempowerment of young refugees and asylum seekers into the Netherlands features in another article.

Contemporary picturebooks about Arab refugees highlight the challenging topic of ‘Displacement and Distancing’, while two other articles on picturebooks strike a lighter tone, dealing respectively with ecoliteracy in the face of disaster, and on the playful elements found in Chinese Opera.

Articles in the ‘Children and Their Books’ section of Bookbird are shorter, but take their subjects seriously. This issue features the difficult topics of how both coronavirus and cancer are confronted in books for young readers that suggest hope through the use of stories with children undergoing treatment.

 ‘Letters’ features a collection of stories from a rural community in India. And in our regular review section, ‘Books on Books’, literature from Latin America, Italy, Poland and Ukraine/Canada feature, along with a study from France of photo-littérature, and proceedings from a conference held at the International Youth Library on One Thousand and One Nights. While the reviews are in English, most of the titles reviewed are not, offering a peep into the fascinating world of children’s and young adult books and critical studies outside the Anglophone world.

Of course, Bookbird would not be complete without ‘Focus IBBY’, and as always, information about international children’s and young adult books is to the forefront. Here the focus is on a fascinating range of projects submitted for the IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award 2024 and the IBBY-iRead Outstanding Reading Promotion Award 2024, along with news from IBBY sections.

EDITORIAL

Finding Hope in Children’s Books | 1
by Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang

FEATURED ARTICLES

In the Eye of the Storm: Black Girl Adolescence in Hurricane Child  | 3
by Stephanie Rambo

“Tell Pebble All About It”: Displacement and Distancing in Contemporary Picturebooks about Arab Refugees | 13
 by Nithya Sivashankar

Reading the Fortune Seeker: (Dis)Empowerment in the Dutch Refugee Experience | 22
by Vera Veldhuizen & Sietse Hagen

Penguin Parables: Picturebook, Interspecies Companionship, and Ecoliteracy | 32
by Sharon Smulders

Representation of Chinese Opera in Xiong Liang’s Picturebooks | 41
by Joanna Karmasz

CHILDREN AND THEIR BOOKS

“I’ve Experienced All of This”: The Issues of the Coronavirus in Literary Texts and Their Reception by Young Readers | 51
by Dávid Dziak

The Tale As an Intervention Instrument for Pediatric Cancer Patients | 57
by Juan Sebastian Lozano Mosos, Soraya Colina Matiz, Juan Hernández Lela & Paula Tatiana Muñoz-Vargas

LETTER

Finding Childhood under the Neem Tree | 63
by Sonika Parashar

BOOKS ON BOOKS | 67
edited by Jutta Reusch—International Youth Library

FOCUS IBBY | 76
by Carolina Ballester

POSTCARDS  | 12, 62, 65, 66, & 82
edited by Anamaria Anderson