Jamila Gavin

This middle-grade book made me cry 😭 Actually, I read this with my 10-year-old niece as part of our four-person book club, and we both cried 😭😭😭 The other two members were busy reading another book because that’s just how this book club works lol.

Jamila Gavin’s My Soul, A Shining Tree is based on the true story of Khudadad Khan—an Indian WWI gunner and the first non-European recipient of the Victoria Cross.

📍 Flanders, Belgium | 1914

📖 The story is brilliantly told show more through the POVs of:

• 12-year-old Lotte, a Belgian farm girl whose village is invaded (my niece thinks Lotte is very brave)
• 15-year-old Ernst, a German boy who lied about his age to join the cavalry (my niece thinks he shouldn’t have lied)
• Khudadad, who crossed an ocean to fight in a war he knew nothing about (my niece thinks he deserved a thousand medals 😂)
• the walnut tree, which witnesses it all

🌳 The walnut tree’s POV was my niece’s favorite, so I think its inclusion in the story was a brilliant idea by the author. It gave a sense of strength during moments when the characters felt lost and scared.

My personal favorite was the letters these characters wrote to their families back home 🥹❤️

📚 I appreciate how Gavin doesn’t sugarcoat the realities of war. The story shows the broken families, the devastation, the fear, and the death, but it’s written in a way that is still appropriate for young readers. AND I absolutely love that the ending offers a sense of hope and happiness 💖

✨ Highly recommend this book!

Because of the heavy topic of WWI and the many shifting POVs, I highly suggest reading and discussing this alongside your child so they don’t get lost in the timelines. They’ll likely have many questions, just as my niece did.

✨ Can we also take a second to appreciate the gorgeous cover art by @rhadso 💛💛💛 The golden light, the poppies, the details… it’s absolutely stunning!!! Big thanks to @harpercollinsin for publishing this gem! show less

Jamila Gavin tells two separate but related stories in this beginning chapter-book about Divali, the Hindu Festival of Lights. Her narrative alternates between a contemporary setting, in which a modern family prepares for Divali, and a mythological one, in which Rama and his allies battle the demon king Ravana. The contemporary events parallel the mythological ones, and similar incidents - Preeta getting lost in the department store, Sita being kidnapped by Ravana, and so on - are presented show more back to back. The book includes a brief introduction about Divali and concludes with a glossary...

Coming Home: A Story About Divali is the first book I have read from Gavin, a British children's author of Indian extraction, but it is not the first I have picked up from illustrator Nilesh Mistry. Interestingly, I have read two other Divali titles - The Story of Divaali and Prince of Fire: The Story of Diwali - both by Jatinder Verma, that Mistry also illustrated. Unfortunately, while the artwork here, which alternated between color and black and white, was quite appealing, the story itself left something to be desired. Or rather, the story structure left something to be desired. The retelling of the myth of Rama, Sita and Ravana was comparable to other children's versions of this tale that I have read, but the switching back and forth between the mythological and contemporary storylines was awkwardly done. There was no explanation offered in the text for the switching, which was done abruptly, and although each chapter was usually devoted to one narrative or another, certain sections of the realistic story had a sentence-long snippet from the myth. I think the intention was to parallel the two storylines, as mentioned above, but the effect felt forced, and sometimes a little random. I think a better approach, one I have seen taken in a number of children's books about the Chinese Mid-Autumn Moon Festival - Christina Matula's The Shadow in the Moon: A Tale of the Mid-Autumn Festival, for instance - would have been to have characters in the contemporary storyline narrate parts of the mythological tale to the children. This would have tied the two strands together nicely, and been far less awkward. I enjoyed this one largely for the Nilesh Mistry artwork, and would recommend it primarily to his fans. show less

This is a beautiful book, a standard by which any book on creation and cosmological myths should be founded. The stories are simple and straightforward, easy to understand but complex enough to make sense and to provide interest to read further. Gavin has chosen the tales well and the book is filled with light and dark, anger and happiness, fear and harmony, joy and sorrow. The stories are a good glimpse at the rich mythos and pantheon that make up Hinduism. I found myself appreciating the show more beauty of some aspects of the faith in a way I hadn't before. Doing that to someone with a graduate degree in religion who is reading a book aimed at intermediate readers is impressive. (Or maybe I'm just easily wowed.)

Even better, though were the illustrations. Amanda Hall's artwork looks like it was done by someone who has trained for years in the traditional Hindu methods. While these look simple and two dimensional, they are actually quite complex in structure as consistency of form, shape, color, contrast, and use of space all follow specific rules. To make beautiful art that fits those rules is a talent and Hall has it. This artwork could easily hang side by side with the paintings I purchased in Rajastan. (Yes I paid several times what I could have because I have sucker written on my forehead and I can't haggle to save my life but this stuff is so beautiful the artists deserve every penny. I like pretend the money actually went to the artists, too.)

So if you have any interest in Hindu myth or culture, or pretty pictures, check out this book. Highly recommended. show less

This is a beautiful book, a standard by which any book on creation and cosmological myths should be founded. The stories are simple and straightforward, easy to understand but complex enough to make sense and to provide interest to read further. Gavin has chosen the tales well and the book is filled with light and dark, anger and happiness, fear and harmony, joy and sorrow. The stories are a good glimpse at the rich mythos and pantheon that make up Hinduism. I found myself appreciating the show more beauty of some aspects of the faith in a way I hadn't before. Doing that to someone with a graduate degree in religion who is reading a book aimed at intermediate readers is impressive. (Or maybe I'm just easily wowed.)

Even better, though were the illustrations. Amanda Hall's artwork looks like it was done by someone who has trained for years in the traditional Hindu methods. While these look simple and two dimensional, they are actually quite complex in structure as consistency of form, shape, color, contrast, and use of space all follow specific rules. To make beautiful art that fits those rules is a talent and Hall has it. This artwork could easily hang side by side with the paintings I purchased in Rajastan. (Yes I paid several times what I could have because I have sucker written on my forehead and I can't haggle to save my life but this stuff is so beautiful the artists deserve every penny. I like pretend the money actually went to the artists, too.)

So if you have any interest in Hindu myth or culture, or pretty pictures, check out this book. Highly recommended. show less