Ping's Perfect Pot - Helen H. Wu - ★★★★.¼

-
AUTHOR: Helen H. Wu
ILLUSTRATOR: Zihua Yang
GENRE: Children's Picture Book
PUBLICATION DATE: January 7, 2025
RATING: 4.25 stars.


In a Nutshell: A wonderful OwnVoices picture book about a young girl’s attempt at making the perfect pot for the lunar year. Great story, great life lessons, great illustrations, great representation, great information. Recommended!


Plot Preview:
Ping and her grandpa have brought home a little tangerine tree for the Lunar New Year. The tree is lovely but the pot it is planted in is plain. So Ping decides to make the perfect pot to go with the special tree. This task turns out to be tougher than she assumed as all her attempts fail in some way or the other. What if she cannot make the perfect pot in time for the celebrations? Will the new year be ruined?


I like how the setting isn’t specified in the book. So the story can fit in any Asian location celebrating this special occasion as well as in an Asian-dominant locality in another country such as the various Chinatowns in the USA.

Ping’s relationship with her grandpa is amazing. I love how Grandpa always encourages her to keep trying, and later, even makes her realise the value of the discarded earlier attempts. Their bond comes out strongly. A grandpa-granddaughter combo is among the very best in picture books.

There is a detailed note at the end, not just about the meaning of Lunar New Year but also about how it is celebrated and some customs pertaining to it. The author’s note about the influence behind the story is also quite touching. However, both of these notes are quite detailed, so most children will need adult guidance to read them.

Picture books about persisting and using failures as lessons towards success are fairly common. But in this day and age of instant gratification and shortcuts to success, such lessons have become all the more important. Children need to understand the value of the good old traits of patience and perseverance in working towards a goal. Moreover, they also need to understand the futility of always aiming for perfection.

Two factors make this book stand out among other picture books with a similar theme: 1. The Lunar New Year angle, which offers plenty of information about this East/SouthEast Asian festival; and 2. The depiction of how “failures” also have their own merit and aren’t entirely worthless.

The vocabulary level is apt for the target age group of 4-8 years. But the number of lines is quite sparse for the older readers of this segment; most of the pages have only 1-2 lines of text. There are many onomatopoeic sounds and action words in the content, which would make this a wonderful option for read-alouds as well.

The illustrations are cute. Every person/item, whether major or minor to the storyline, is sketched with intricacy. I love how nicely red and gold have been woven into the colour scheme of almost every page.

Definitely recommended to those looking for an interesting OwnVoices work with a nice story and important morals. The info about the special ‘new year’ is a bonus. This would also make a great option in classrooms looking for authentic books about other cultures.

My thanks to Beaming Books and Augsburg Fortress Publishers for providing the DRC of “Ping's Perfect Pot” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

Comments

Post a Comment

Explore more posts from this blog:

The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife - Anna Johnston - ★★★★.½

-
Image
AUTHOR: Anna Johnston GENRE: Contemporary Fiction PUBLICATION DATE: September 10, 2024 RATING: 4.5 stars In a Nutshell: A heartwarming contemporary drama with a geriatric lead character. Amazing characters, great storyline, a couple of wow twists along the way. As impactful as Ove, but not at all like Ove. Read with your heart and not with your head to enjoy it better. My heart cooperated, for once. Plot Preview: At eighty-two, Frederick Fife is all alone in the world. Lonely, broke, and on the verge of losing his home, Frederick has nothing to look forward to. But in an unexpected turn of luck, a case of mistaken identity leads him to be taken for Bernard Greer, a grumpy resident at the local nursing home. Now Frederick has all that he wanted: a roof over his head, food in his belly, and most importantly, companionship. But how long will this last? What will happen when Bernard is found? The story comes to us in three third-person perspectives: that of Frederick and of two other k...
Read More»

Shalama: My 96 Seasons in China - Jean Hoffmann Lewanda - ★★

-
Image
AUTHOR: Jean Hoffmann Lewanda GENRE: Historical Fiction PUBLICATION DATE: October 15, 2024 RATING: 2 stars. In a Nutshell: Officially, a historical fiction based on the life of the author’s mother. However, the writing is heavily non-fiction in style and not character-focussed. This might work better as a memoir but after some finetuning of the presentation. Plot Preview: 1928. Harbin, China. Born to a Russian Jewish family who emigrated from Europe to Harbin a few years earlier, Shalama is intimately familiar with life in a city filled with European Jewish and Russian immigrants fleeing various pogroms. As Harbin, known as the ‘Paris of the East’ is a thriving village-turned-town thanks to these new citizens, it feels more like a white community than a Chinese town. When the Japanese come to Harbin in the 1930s, Shalama’s family moves to Shanghai, where she becomes a typist after her schooling, and marries an Austrian Jew named Paul. However, there are still some changes to come in ...
Read More»

Blink and Glow - Raven Howell - ★★★★

-
Image
  AUTHOR:  Raven Howell ILLUSTRATOR: Ann Pilicer GENRE: Children's Picture Book PUBLICATION DATE: July 15, 2024 RATING:  4 stars. In a Nutshell: A sweet picture book about appreciating nature and its creatures. Good story, lovely illustrations, important message. Recommended. Plot Preview: Leo and Lilly love chasing fireflies and salamanders in their backyard. They even manage to capture one of each in a glass jar to take it to school for show-and-tell. However, when they show their treasures to Grandma, she wisely guides them towards doing what is right for the creatures, and even shows them a way they can take a ‘firefly’ and a ‘salamander’ to show-and-tell.   When I read the start of the story and saw the kids happily capturing those lovely creatures in glass jars, my heart began to sink. This wasn’t at all an activity I could advocate! Just as I was wondering how I would review this book politely, Grandma came to the rescue. 😍 The picture boo...
Read More»

Violent Advents: A Christmas Horror Anthology - Edited by L. Stephenson - ★★★.¼

-
Image
  EDITOR: L. Stephenson GENRE: Christmas Horror Anthology PUBLICATION DATE:  December 12, 2024 RATING: 3.3 stars. In a Nutshell: A short-fiction anthology filled with Christmassy horror. Some really good stories here, though I wish there had been more variety in the “source of the evil.” A good option for those who are fed up of saccharine seasonal stories. This is the time of the year when readers are torn between spooky season and Christmas season. Here's a book that combines both. 😉 This indie anthology contains twenty-six stories by twenty-six writers. There’s no editor’s note, but the title and the tagline make the theme clear – it is a “Christmas horror” anthology. The stories are mostly fast-paced, which works well in this genre. After the first few stories, I wondered why a majority of them were using the Christmas tree as the horror device-of-choice. It occurred frequently enough for me to start eyeing every Christmas tree in the stories suspiciously. Only after...
Read More»

Making Up the Gods - Marion Agnew - ★★★★.¼

-
Image
AUTHOR: Marion Agnew GENRE: Contemporary Fiction PUBLICATION DATE: October 15, 2023 RATING: 4.25 stars. In a Nutshell: An indie drama with some quirky characters and a great setting in Lake Superior, Canada. Mellow in tone, genuine in content, thought-provoking in themes. I enjoyed this unusual novel. Plot Preview: Simone, almost 70, is a retired widow who lives an isolated life in her cottage on the banks of Lake Superior and still misses her husband, though he’s been dead for five years. While she is now active in her local church and finds solace in baking for those grieving, she is fiercely protective of her privacy. But when the local reverend asks her to take care of nine-year-old Chen while his widowed mother goes on a much-needed trip, Simone finds it tough to refuse a fellow-mourning widow. Just before Chen arrives, a stranger named Martin knocks at Simone’s door, claiming to be her cousin. Simone is suddenly handling two strangers at once, and she worries that they will dis...
Read More»