Our California

author: Pam Muñoz Ryan

illustrator: Rafael López 

Charlesbridge, 2008

grades 1-4

Our California (previously California, Here We Come!) has been re-illustrated and re-designed, with short poems that celebrate 14 of California’s major cities and regions, and back matter that includes state symbols and additional artwork and information about each place.

López’s double-page spreads are stunning. Rendered in bright, bold acrylics on a palette of mostly reds, greens, blues and purples, the paintings are heavily saturated and textured by scratching and scraping the paint on grained wood. Some bring to mind the Mexican muralistas and WPA artists, others have a graphic-novel feel, and still others have a sort of folkloric tone. There is also a good deal of magical realism here. For instance, the spread for “Los Angeles” shows a movie director riding a terrified mastodon, who is stuck in the tautologically named “La Brea Tar Pits” near Hollywood.

However, Ryan’s text—and I cannot say this strongly enough—inculcates in young students the appreciation of the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny. Each descriptive spread consists of a rhyming four-line verse that—by disappearing the Indigenous peoples, enslaved people, and super-exploited poor and working people, all of whom actually built California—erases any real history and leaves youngsters with nothing of value. For example,

San Juan Capistrano is where you will learn

about a quaint village where swallows return.

Junipero Serra stopped here on his way

to build a grand mission from adobe clay.

Junipero Serra did not build anything. Rather, it was his padres and soldiers who wreaked havoc—physical and spiritual—on the enslaved Indian people who built the 21 missions that line El Camino Real.

Another example: In the section describing the Central Valley, López’s spread at least shows a few agricultural workers, but Ryan’s text disappears them.

The Great Central Valley, with its plentiful yields,

feeds the whole nation with its orchards and fields.

This rich, thirsty farmland needs water to thrive.

Canals, pumps, and dams keep this valley alive.

The back matter, consisting of 75 bulleted informational items, follows no organizational pattern other than proximity to the geographical locations in the text. Most of the items are incorrect and seem to have been haphazardly plucked out of less-than-authentic sources; and many of them appear to have been written by clueless elementary school students. For instance:

Thousands of years ago Asian hunters migrated to North America through what is now Alaska. Their descendants, the first Californians, later became known as Native Americans.

I could easily deconstruct each textual section, but I won’t bother. Despite López’s excellent artwork, Our California is not recommended.

—Beverly Slapin
(published 12/22/14)

Dreamer

author: Pam Muñoz Ryan

illustrator: Peter Sis

Scholastic, 2010 

grades 4-up 

Chilean

In 2004, I published in MultiCultural Review a biographical essay by Chilean-American poet and memoirist Marjorie Agosín to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Pablo Neruda. For Agosín and countless other Chilean poets and dreamers, Neruda is their inspiration and hero, an essential part of their culture and themselves.

Knowing how much Neruda means to my Chilean friends, I approached The Dreamer with some trepidation. Would this fictionalized biography distort the poet’s life and words, or lose them in translation? Would the author and illustrator be able to capture essential truths while giving leeway to their own imaginations?

Right away, I noted the sense of continuity from Neruda’s words to those of Agosín and now Ryan, like Sís’s drawings of birds that grow larger and stronger, carrying Neruda’s poetry to ever more distant lands. Readers meet young Neftalí Reyes at age eight, a physically delicate child who lives in fear of his overbearing father. José Reyes, the railway foreman, wants his son to be a doctor or a dentist, but in addition to his nonstop daydreaming and playing with words, Neftalí struggles with math. 

The portrait of Neftalí’s father is nuanced—he’s a self-made man who wants his children to have a better life than he had, and he fears his younger son and middle child will succumb to illness as his mother did (she died shortly after his birth). The poet’s older brother Rodolfo, younger sister Laurita, and stepmother Mamadre are also lovingly portrayed. Rodolfo tries to protect his younger brother from his father’s wrath, and Neftalí in turn feels a sense of responsibility toward Laurita when their father forces them to swim in the ocean.

Ryan touches also on the political concerns that would become an important part of Neruda’s life and work, through his Uncle Orlando, the newspaper editor, and his own meeting with a Mapuche boy his age—part of an Indigenous nation that resisted conquest for hundreds of years but was ultimately driven from ancestral lands in central and southern Chile. (Battles to reclaim those lands continue today.) Throughout the novel, names, usually only mentioned, convey the country’s Indigenous roots—the rivers Bío-Bío and Cautín, the towns Ranquilco, Lonquen, and Carahue, and the chucao bird and copihue flower.

Through vignettes real, embellished, and imagined—for Ryan ventures several times into the realm of pure fantasy—readers observe the 12-year process in which Neftalí, with the support of his siblings, Mamadre, Uncle Orlando, and other caring adults (though left out is Chile’s other Nobel Laureate, Gabriela Mistral, whose brief relationship to the future poet is portrayed in Deborah Kogan Roy’s To Go Singing Through the World) is able to come into himself. He adopts the pen name Pablo Neruda, which circumvents his father’s fear that his literary and political pursuits will embarrass the family.

Sís’s illustrations and the book’s overall design are exquisite. This is a book that dreamers young and old will treasure. Highly recommended.

—Lyn Miller-Lachmann
(published 4/7/13)