From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 2—Yumi introduces readers to her country via this informational picture book. She starts with her bedroom, detailing her desk, lamp, bed (futon), closet, and school bag, and then takes readers through her kitchen, explaining what she and her family eat, and the bathroom. Small illustrations of the featured items face a full-page, full-color picture of the room, and children can look for the individual objects in it. Yumi then shows her school and explains how things work there. Transportation, vacation times, and holidays and festivals are also described. There is an illustration of a public bath (which includes cartoonish nude figures from the rear). There are no detailed descriptions of the items. On the topic of food, for example, tiny renderings show dishes such as sushi, sukiyaki, and kare raisu, but there's no explanation of what they consist of or how to pronounce them. There are tidbits that may be interesting, such as the fact that the students all help to clean the school each day, and that they remove their shoes and change into slippers there. There are also samples of Japanese writing, with the hiragana characters included as well. This is an additional purchase, better for browsing than for gaining information.—
DeAnn Okamura, San Mateo County Library, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Yumi, a seven-year-old Japanese girl, shows readers her home (bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom), her school, the public bath, a Tokyo subway station, and a street of shops in the city. In the next section, she introduces traditions related to the New Year, Girls’ Day, Children’s Day (or Boy’s Day), Tanabata (a traditional star festival), Undokai (Sports Day), and Shichi-Go-San (a festival for “three- and seven-year-old girls, and three- and five-year-old boys”). Finally, the book introduces Japanese forms of writing. Expanding the text, the paintings offer charming yet informative glimpses of a child’s world in contemporary, or near-contemporary, Japan. A typical spread includes a full-page painting facing a white page with a few lines of text and several small, captioned pictures. First published in France but created by a writer/illustrator who grew up in Japan, this picture book presents an appealing look at family and school life in her native country.
