A Review of Saraswati's Way by Monika Schröder

If you liked the film Slumdog Millionaire, take a look at Saraswati's Way, a YA novel about a young math whiz living in a small village in the Indian countryside.

Akash's life is not good, and it's about to get worse. His teacher has been kind enough to tutor him on the side, but has already taught Akash everything he knows. Akash won't be able to get more schooling without a scholarship because his family has no money. His mother is dead, and his father works very hard to support the entire household, including Akash's ruthless grandmother, who will hear no wrong spoken of her eldest son, Akash's uncle, even as he drains the family's limited financial resources with his opium addiction and gambling.

The loan shark who owns their farm insists on being paid the back rent he's owed despite the drought, and then the unthinkable happens: Akash's father dies. (Sorry for the spoiler, but it happens pretty early in the book, your basic inciting incident.) Akash has barely stumbled through the mourning rites when the creditor comes calling and the boy's grandmother sends him to work in Kumar-ji's quarry, ostensibly to pay off the family's debts. Except—Akash sneaks a peek at the quarry ledgers and swiftly calculates that none of the workers ever actually get out of debt; their debt even increases. Determined to escape what is clearly a life of slavery, Akash hops a train and runs away to New Delhi, hoping to continue his math studies somehow.

Once there, he joins a little gaggle of boys living in the train station and becomes a street kid before he can find his way, or rather, Saraswati's way. Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of knowledge and the arts. Akash prays to her, worrying about his future. He also frets over the past, especially an odd incident with his father and a tortoise shortly before the man's death. Akash tries to figure out how his father's last words might be fulfilled, which seemed to indicate that he will be able to achieve his dreams. He eventually learns that the quick road to his goals is dishonorable and is not meant to be.

This is a fairly quiet book, or at least a serious one, but Akash's adventures keep it moving forward as readers wonder what he will do next and how he will fulfill his dreams. We also get an excellent introduction to what India is like. While the author's descriptions of New Delhi and various aspects of Indian culture occasionally feel pedantic, they provide an intriguing glimpse of a way of life that many young readers may never have encountered before.

In addition, we learn a little about Akash's math prowess and strategies, some of which are even derived from the ancient Hindu scriptures, the Vedas. (Saraswati is the Vedas's patron deity.) Math ability isn't always honored in children's literature, so this was a nice aspect of the book. I especially like how Akash uses his talent to overcome some of the problems he encounters. And, perhaps even more important, Akash learns to value his integrity. After a disastrous encounter with a drug dealer, he seems unlikely to compromise it again.

I'm afraid we really don't have enough reader-friendly books set in countries like India. Add Saraswati's Way to your list of multicultural titles about genuine kids living their lives in other lands.

And by the way, what a pretty cover! Did you notice the numbers literally written in the stars?

I will mention that Saraswati's Way feels a little rushed in spots. Lately, I'm beginning to suspect a conspiracy on the part of publishers pushing plots to move faster, ever faster! In any case, the book ends a bit abruptly, with solutions to Akash's woes which seem to come too easily. Then again, whether his fairy godmother is Saraswati or a kindly street vendor, I think you'll agree that this boy deserves his happy ending.

Note for Worried Parents: At first I thought this was a middle grade novel. Akash is 12 and seems very much a tween. But the mature situations push it over into YA—homeless children, glue sniffing, scary drug dealers, and, at one point, a vague threat from a man who's obviously a pedophile.

A Review of Mama Says: A Book of Love for Mothers and Sons by Rob D. Walker and Leo and Diane Dillon

The more poetic type of concept book has lost ground in recent years. At a recent SCBWI conference I attended, it was clear that editors were hungry for action-packed, TV-esque plotting in children’s books. I’ve also heard it from my own editors: “This is lovely, but it’s not commercial enough.”

A concept picture book is centered around an idea rather than a plot. Or plot may be hinted at, but only because the concept conveys a certain degree of chronology or simply because pages are being turned. Alphabet books and books about colors or opposites are well-known examples, but the best concept books may be less obviously educational: take a look at Charles G. Shaw’s dreamy cloud book, It Looked Like Spilled Milk; Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s First the Egg; and Margaret Wise Brown’s The Important Book, for instance.

So what does it take to get a concept book published these days? Well, in the case of Mama Says: A Book of Love for Mothers and Sons, it takes the grand lions of illustration and a message the world seems to be in need of. Rob D. Walker is a fairly new author, but I hope you’ve heard of the formidable husband-and-wife illustration team, Leo and Diane Dillon.

Memorable concept books read like poems, and Mama Says is no exception. Each spread shows a different mother teaching her son, with her words presented as an unpunctuated seven-line poem. The lines are brief, as you’ll see in my favorite stanza:

Mama says
Embrace the moon
And marvel at the sun
Mama says
To study stars
And make a wish on one

This is about as specific as it gets, which isn’t what you want to see in poetry. Most of the stanzas sound like proverbs or the types of pat advice parents give their children, e.g., “Mama says/To put my heart/In everything I do.” But saying this does the book a disservice because Mama Says works better as a whole than in parts. One of the strongest messages of the book is that we live in a global community. Each spread represents a mother and son from a different part of the world, and each stanza is also given in translation from the corresponding language: Cherokee, Russian, Amharic, Japanese, Hindi, Inuktitut, Hebrew, English, Korean, Arabic, Quechua, and Danish (key at the back of the book). I also noticed that some of the messages seemed particularly relevant to the culture being depicted, another thoughtful aspect of the book, e.g., inner peace relating to meditation practices in India.

If the “showing” is not given in the words, it is provided in the illustrations, done in the Dillons’ signature soft-edged style. The idea of “sharing” sounds pretty vague, but it becomes clear as a Russian boy gives a loaf of bread he and his mother have just baked to an elderly man. The Japanese boy who is told to be true and put his heart in everything he does is shown in a smaller left-hand illustration confessing to having broken a vase, then repairing the vase with his mother’s help in the larger illustration on the facing page.

Good poems tend to conclude with a bang, and the last line of this book, in conjunction with the illustration, gets it right. The ending ties everything together with uncommon grace.

While I’m presenting Mama Says right now partly so you can think about ordering it as a Mother’s Day gift, I did wonder about the role of fathers and wish for a book like this for them, too.

There is more than one reference to God in Mama Says, which some readers might not relate to, but then again, the references are presented as being culture-specific and furthermore seem appropriate in a book about teaching children values in different countries. The mercenary, splintered, and combative nature of the modern world is a source of worry to many parents. Whether you’re religious or not, I believe you’ll find inspiration in this beautifully made book, Mama Says: A Book of Love for Mothers and Sons.

Because of the importance of Leo and Diane Dillon in the picture book world, I want to add a brief note about their other books. They are best known for winning back-to-back Caldecott medals, in 1976 for Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears (author Verna Aardema) and in 1977 for Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions (author Margaret Musgrove). They have won numerous other awards and created a lot of jacket art, along with many picture books. Recent books include Jazz on a Saturday Night (a Coretta Scott King Honor Book), Mother Goose Numbers on the Loose, The People Could Fly: The Picture Book (also a Coretta Scott King Honor Book), Earth Mother, and Whirlwind Is a Spirit Dancing. My personal favorites are out of print: two books by poet Nancy Willard—Pish, Posh Said Hieronymous Bosch and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice—and Wind Child by Shirley Rousseau Murphy.

But the most gorgeous book by the Dillons, which is still in print, is their rendition of To Every Thing There Is a Season, the famous verses from Ecclesiastes. A precursor to Mama Says in terms of both design and the theme of universal human truths, the book uses a different culture to represent each couplet, yet each spread is done in a different art style, from different periods of time (with a key at the back). If you don’t own this book, you should. It’s a real showpiece, one of my picture book treasures.

Note for Worried Parents: Mama Says includes one scene where a child’s dead male relative, presumably his father, is shown. The image is presented in the context of Hindu burial customs and is perfectly tender, but I realize some of you may shy away from the book for this reason.