Lenore Look, illustrated by Yumi Heo,
Henry’s First-moon Birthday.
Atheneum, 2001

This warm personal narrative written in the voice of a young child is rich in description of Chinese American traditions and the hubbub of one family’s life on a special day. Jen, the narrator, presents a series of vignettes with appealing spunk ("I’ve been in charge of our house ever since Mother had a baby," she declares) and attention to the simple elements of daily life ("This is the sun in my bedroom window as it slips in front of the stars, just as GninGnin and I slip out of bed"). This is the day of Baby Henry’s "first moon," which means there will be a traditional one-month party for him, and it is the last day that Jen’s beloved grandmother, GninGnin, will be staying with the family to help with the new baby.

Though Henry appears midway through the book, screaming in concert with the vacuum cleaner, he doesn’t get full attention until we’re almost at the end, where we find him fast asleep under the gaze of a gaggle of cousins. This is Jen’s book, and what matters to her is that she has work to do and a grandmother to love. Her "look at this" storytelling style is simple and refreshing: "This is the chicken pot boiling over. Look at GninGnin go!" Chinese calligraphy, car repairs, the preparation of bright red eggs for good luck, and bath time are all treated with the same appealing directness.

Yumi Heo’s figures and scenes are deceptively simple combinations of shapes that offer both the impression of a child’s drawings and the rewards of a well-crafted, thoughtfully designed picture book. Working with pencil, oil paint, and collage, Heo takes a vigorous approach to expository detail: bowls of food float around the kitchen, so that we can see what the "mushrooms and dates and mysterious things floating in bowls" are all about. In one picture, GninGnin appears two times, once making ink, then painting calligraphy with a brush. It’s worth noting that Heo hasn’t adopted a particular style of artwork especially for this story-telling occasion. Readers of Father’s Rubber Shoes, another book rich in family traditions, will find her approach in this new book familiar.

Henry’s First-Moon Birthday joins other picture book memoirs, including Gary Soto’s Snapshots from the Wedding and Donald Crews’s Bigmama’s in effectively recreating a slice of life through the voice and the eyes of a child the age of the traditional picture-book audience.

Susan Marie Swanson
Summer 2001