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

Chinese Blackbird

SKU 978-1-932690-68-2
$16.95
1
Product Details
UPC: 978-1-932690-68-2
Brand: Modern History Press
Binding: Paperback
Author: Sherry Quan Lee

Critical Acclaim for Sherry Quan Lee's Chinese Blackbird

"Quan Lee eloquently expresses how painful and confusing it can be to embrace the many complex identities that one body can contain. With evocative imagery and words that cut straight to the heart, Quan Lee details her lifelong struggles with both the vagaries and concreteness of race, class, gender and sexual identity. Her guilt and shame are palpable. But so too are her emotional and intellectual triumphs. Like a favorite sad song when we have been dumped by the love of our lives, this volume will be oddly comforting to anyone who has ever been overcome by that sorrow which seems insurmountable."
--Eden Torres, Assistant Professor Women's Studies, Chicano Studies, University of Minnesota

"It’s been a long time since I’ve been treated to a voice so full of honesty about one’s struggle to come to terms with her identity. Through elegant poetry, full of exquisite imagery and detail, Quan Lee takes the reader on her personal, transformative journey in which she explores how race, class, gender and sexual identity inform who she is. Along the way, she encounters rocks and boulders that would have stopped many of us. Instead, she turns them over and examines the creatures hiding in the darkness underneath, leaving no stone on her path unturned. Quan Lee is a courageous woman. She is one of my sheroes."
--Carolyn Holbrook, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Founder and past Artistic/Executive Director of SASE: The Write Place

"In Chinese Blackbird, Sherry Quan Lee renders stories of her complex cultural heritage with the lyrical touch of a poet coming into self-possession. Through the generative power of language, Lee creates an inspirational and a multifarious self. This self blows breath unto the page and into the reader, who may have felt quiescent or invisible, often feeling forced to choose among various enriching worlds, until she experiences the truth that only good literature can unveil about the joys and struggles of defining oneself on one's terms."
--Pamela R. Fletcher, Associate Professor of English Co-Director of Critical Studies in Race and Ethnicity, College of St. Catherine

Learn more about the author at www.SherryQuanLee.com

Book #2 in the Reflections of History Series from Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com

Modern History Press is an imprint of Loving Healing Press

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