Mao and Me
Starred Review. Grade 5–8—When the Cultural Revolution began, the author was a three-year-old living in a northern city. Cared for by his grandparents, he and his two sisters led a quiet, orderly life. His older sister, whom he describes as a deaf mute, taught her siblings to sign and Hong to draw. One day they heard on the radio that Mao had declared a Cultural Revolution, and life began to change. The text tells a straightforward story of the years between 1966 and 1976, while the illustrations shed a strong light on these years through the eyes of one child. Hong's world is presented in various shades of khaki, beige, and gray with color often used to draw viewers' eyes to the individuality of the people, or, in the case of red, to the dominance of the Communist party. The illustrations are full of the details of everyday life: how to make dumplings, the foods they could buy with ration tickets, life in the schoolroom, and the furnishings in the family apartment. But above all, the pictures, with their intense black line drawings, convey strong emotion-the almost inhuman face of a Red Guard who inspects their apartment, Hong crying in bed as his father packs to leave for re-education in the country, his grandmother's sadness when her husband dies and, later, when the Red Guards slaughter her beloved chickens. This powerful work joins Song Nan Zhang'sA Little Tiger in the Chinese Night: An Autobiography in Art(Tundra, 1995) and Ange Zhang'sRed Land, Yellow River: A Story from the Cultural Revolution(Groundwood, 2004) on a growing list of outstanding memoirs about the era.—Barbara Scotto, Children's Literature New England, Brookline, MACopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.