A book from my hometown about my hometown.

Shared with my daughter, we started in January with my reading this book and by the time we finished this week, she was reading it to me. ( )

This book describes the important activities that Carmen Lomas made with her family. She also described special events like a quinceañera, tamalada, posadas, birthdays.
This book is bilingual.

Multicultural pictures about her journey taking family pictures. perfect for ESL students because it has english and spanish. ( )

Summary:

Family Pictures (Cuadros de familia) is a bilingual artistic biography of the author’s depiction of her life growing up in a Mexican-American family in Kingsville, Texas (near the border of Mexico). The author writes this story first by painting pictures and then describing what is happening in each of the pictures. This story is like a collection of memories drawn and written. There is no chronological order to the sequence of events, but more of an overall account of her family’s customs and culture. She tells us about the local fair she used to attend with her family, the times spent with her grandparents, the different celebrations that her family and community attend and the different customs her family partakes in. The entire story acts as a small representation of her childhood, family life and community life.

Comments (opinions/arguments):

This story is a wonderful example of a great bilingual book. I feel like it’s hard to come across bilingual children’s picture books that incorporate the story both in English and another language. I really like how on each page, the English written part is at the top and the Spanish version is on the bottom. I think this is a great idea for both monolingual and bilingual children because they can practice either reading both versions. I also really enjoyed the wonderful and very detailed illustrations in this story. The author does a really good of depicting the story and what making the scenes look so real. After I read the descriptions, I can really get a feel for what it must’ve been like in her life by looking at the illustrations. Although many people might find it weird that she didn't exactly write a chronological story about her life and that it’s mostly just random memories, I still find it quite meaningful. I think she did a great job of describing her home life, family life, community life and her entire culture. The picture that made the most impact on me is the same picture that is on the front cover of the book. The picture depicts her entire family helping each other make tamales in the kitchen. She even says, “In some families just the women make tamales, but in our family everybody helps.” I think this really gives the reader an inside look at the culture of Mexican-Americans, but also at the differences even inside the same culture. I think this book does a really good job depicting Mexican-American families and their culture and could be beneficial to any child. ( )

This book was really a collection of memories by the author with accompanying illustrations. The main message of this story was about family. I enjoyed this book. One thing that I liked about the book was how the words really explained the illustration. The pictures did not really explain anything extra about the story. The author drew the picture and then wrote exactly what she drew. I have never read a story like that, so I thought it was interesting. A second thing I liked about this story was that it was written in both Spanish and English. The first paragraph explaining the illustration was written in English and the second was written in Spanish. I liked that the story had the full translation. A lot of books incorporate Spanish words into the English story, so I thought it was interesting to provide a full exact translation. It also made it easier to see the relationship between certain Spanish words and certain English words. It also really showed how important Spanish was to the author’s family. ( )