My Mom Is a Foreigner, But Not to Me

August 12, 2013
Mothers come in all kinds, but when they are immigrants, children are quick to notice moments of culture clash. Moore (the Freckleface Strawberry books) uses an everykid narrative voice to parse the embarrassments and delights of having a mother who hails from distant shores: “She calls me foreign nicknames,/ wee one, liebchen, bebe./ I tell her all the time/ ‘Those words sound so crazy!’ ” Working in loose, bright watercolors, So (Brush of the Gods) shifts between several mother/child pairs: there’s the stylish French woman who mortifies her son by shouting “Mon petit chou!” at his soccer game; two mothers who prefer clothing with vivid African and Caribbean patterns; and (in an inversion of so many adoption stories) a Japanese mother with a white daughter. The meter is inconsistent, and many rhymes are slant, raising the question of why the book is written in verse at all. It’s a well-intentioned remainder of America’s melting pot past and present, but the delivery is underwhelming. Ages 5–8. Author’s agent: David Kuhn, Kuhn Projects. Illustrator’s agent: Heflin Reps.

September 1, 2013
A chorus of children with foreign-born mothers join voices to express their side of the immigrant experience. Having a mom who's a foreigner can be tough. "She makes me do stuff foreign ways," like taking soup to school and kissing people hello. Child and mom don't always look alike, and her accent--not to mention the silly foreign nicknames--attracts unwanted attention. But "compared to OTHER Moms, / I know that she's the best." Moore's well-meaning book, inspired by her own childhood, is something of a disaster. The rhyming quatrains limp along, forcing scansion to suit the rhyme scheme: "My Mom is a foreigner, / She's from another place. / She came when she was ten years old, / With only one suitcase." Amateurish rhyme is just one of this book's problems, though. Adult and child readers alike would be forgiven for thinking that those four lines are spoken by the same child and refer to the same mother, but they don't. Seemingly arbitrary changes in typography are clues that the child speaker is changing; narration is shared in five different typefaces among eight or so children with mothers from all over the globe. So's illustrations, uncharacteristically, do not rise to the admittedly considerable design challenge, failing to provide sufficient clues to let readers know which statements belong to which child until the last few pages, when it is far too late. A confusing mess. (Picture book. 5-8)

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December 1, 2013

K-Gr 2-Children from many cultures express their feelings about having a mother born in a different country in this confusing attempt to celebrate the immigrant experience. Moore does capture the internal conflict youngsters feel about having a parent who is different; some of the kids love the funny kinds of foods they eat and know all of the parts of the foreign songs their moms sing, while others find the food gross and the strange customs and nicknames embarrassing. Told in a clumsy verse with forced rhymes and an awkward meter, this story unfortunately falls flat. "She talks a little funny./She has an accent: it is French!/She had to learn a new language here/Because her words weren't making sense." Changes in font are distracting and introduce contradictory thoughts in the same paragraph. "We eat funny kinds of foods sometimes./I love it./It tastes gross./My Grandma made it, she taught my Mom./I put it on my toast!" So's bright watercolor illustrations, while full of multicultural characters and ethnic details, do little to clarify the speakers or complement the text. The concept is heartfelt but the author attempts to cover too many details and emotions.-Kristine M. Casper, Huntington Public Library, NY

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2014
The handful of children depicted in So's urbane illustrations take turns expressing their ambivalence about traits (language, wardrobe, etc.) that peg their moms as "foreign." Actress and child-of-an-immigrant-mom Moore did much better with her Freckleface Strawberry stories: here the message is sound, but she doesn't seem to realize that there's more to crafting verse than rhyming each line's last syllable.

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