Midwest Book Review on “Holidays With a Tail”

Holidays with a Tail: A Tale of Winter Celebrations” is multicultural holiday story that appeals to culturally diverse juvenile audiences.

Written experienced elementary school teacher, Kelly Bouldin Darmofal, Holidays with a Tail begins the story with Alex on Christmas Eve, after having just moved from the suburbs to the city. Alex had wished for a Christmas gift of a puppy to play with. The next day brings one new surprise after another. Being Episcopalian, Alex celebrated Christian traditions in December, and he was overjoyed to find a puppy-sized box with holes in the lid for his present. Out popped Zipper, his new adorable golden puppy, his special Christmas gift.

The next day, when grandparents came bringing more Christmas gifts, Zipper surprised Alex by running out the door and into the snowy night. This begins a wonderful tale of exploration of ways different folk with different religious traditions celebrate the midwinter time of Solstice.

Zipper leads Alex and his mom, Katy on an exploration and traveling tour of festivities and homes, including four different families celebrating the Jewish Hanukkah, the Hindu Dwali, the Latina las Posadas, and the African American Kwanzaa. Each resident kindly explains the symbols and reasons for their celebrations, along with special foods and candle lighting customs and their significance.

Alex and Katy reclaim Zipper and eventually return to their home to celebrate Christmas dinner with their family and their special foods and gifts.

“Holidays with a Tail: A Tale of Winter Celebrations” is the perfect vehicle to explain to young children the wonderful richness and significance of different holiday celebration traditions for different cultures, peoples, and religions.

Read the original review on MBR


Holidays With a Tail: A Tale of Winter Celebrations
Kelly Bouldin Darmofal, author
Brad A. Calhoun, illustrator
Loving Healing Press
5145 Pontiac Trail, Ann Arbor, MI 48105
www.LovingHealing.com
9781615996155, $17.95 PB, $29.95 HC, $4.95 Kindle, 34pp

Blue Earth

SKU 978-1-61599-146-4
$19.95
1
Product Details
UPC: 978-1-61599-146-4
Brand: Modern History Press
Binding: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Author: Anya Achtenberg

Blue Earth is a compelling novel of Minnesota, a land that guards its secrets. Carver Heinz loses both farm and family in the farm crisis of the 1980s. Displaced into urban Minneapolis, he becomes obsessed with Angie, a beautiful child he rescues from a tornado in an encounter he insists they keep silent.

Her close friendship with a Dakota Indian boy fuels Carver’s rage and unleashes a series of events that reveal the haunting power of each character's past and of their shared histories, especially the 1862 Dakota Conflict and public hanging of 38 Dakota--the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

"We... see our own lives reflected in Blue Earth's dark mirror, even as we learn a tragic history kept from us by those who would forever erase our origins... This is a brilliant novel by one of our truly intuitive and accomplished writers"
--Margaret Randall, author of Ruins

"Achtenberg's passionate, brilliantly crafted language, combined with her profound ethical imagination, makes Blue Earth one of the most important books to appear at this moment in our history."
--Demetria Martinez, author of Mother Tongue

"Achtenberg creates morally complex and culturally diverse characters whose lives are affected by loss, poverty, disease, and war, but whose ultimately redemptive encounters with one another take Blue Earth far beyond its Midwester setting."
--Martha Collins, author of Blue Front

"In the great tradition of Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner, Anya Achtenberg writes of the violence, past and present, that shapes the people of the vast American Midwest. Deep and searing, Blue Earth is perhaps one of the best novels of the past decade."
--Kathleen Spivack, author of With Robert Lowell and His Circle

Learn more at www.AnyaAchtenberg.com

From the Reflections of History Series

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