It’s Literacy Month! But it’s always Literacy Month at the Pinkston house – we’re all obsessed with books, even my two-year-old.
One of my favorite library finds this last week was young adult novel “April and the Dragon Lady,” by author Lensey Namioka.
April is the teenaged daughter of Chinese American parents. She lives with her father, her brother, and her aging grandmother, her own mother having passed away some years before. Because April is the daughter, traditionally the care of the house and of her grandmother falls to her, and she doesn’t think to question it. Her brother, Harry, is basically the prince of the place, able to study at the library as much as he would like while April’s own studies go neglected because she was too busy in doing things for her grandmother. No one sees a problem with this arrangement until April meets Steve through a club at school.
Steve is an All-American kid who finds all things Asian to be fascinating. What he doesn’t like is the way April’s grandmother keeps her from having a little fun. April has never seen things this way before – she’s always thought she was just doing her duty, but as April gets closer to Steve, her grandmother starts playing mental games, trying to appear more and more helpless to keep April at home, and April realizes that much of her freedom has been taken away from her. Her grandmother isn’t trying to be hurtful—she’s just doggedly holding on to the old ways and doesn’t understand why anyone would want to move away from them.
April feels a tremendous internal conflict as she tries to decide what it is that she truly wants. In the end, she comes up with a plan that makes both her grandmother and herself happy, a compromise that brings East and West a little nearer each other while retaining a respectful distance.
(This book was published in 1994 by Brown Deer Press.)
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