Sakura's Cherry Blossoms
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A warm, gorgeous exploration of a little girl's experience immigrating to a new country and missing her home and her grandmother, who still lives far away.
Sakura's dad gets a new job in America, so she and her parents make the move from their home in Japan. When she arrives in the States, most of all she misses her grandmother and the cherry blossom trees, under which she and her grandmother used to play and picnic. She wonders how she'll ever feel at home in this new place, with its unfamiliar language and landscape. One day, she meets her neighbor, a boy named Luke, and begins to feel a little more settled. When her grandmother becomes ill, though, her family takes a trip back to Japan. Sakura is sad when she returns to the States and once again reflects on all she misses. Luke does his best to cheer her up -- and tells her about a surprise he knows she'll love, but she'll have to wait till spring. In the meantime, Sakura and Luke's friendship blooms and finally, when spring comes, Luke takes her to see the cherry blossom trees flowering right there in her new neighborhood.
Sakura's Cherry Blossoms captures the beauty of the healing power of friendship through Weston's Japanese poetry-inspired text and Saburi's breathtaking illustrations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Seeing these blossoms in bloom/ is always finest with friends," Sakura's grandmother Obaachan tells her as they picnic underneath flowering cherry trees. Sakura loves her grandmother and misses her when her family moves from Japan to the United States. With lyrical prose and sentences written, an afterword explains, in the Japanese poetic form of tanka Weston (The Creature Department) chronicles the trials of adapting to another culture. Sakura gets used to new words ("They nipped and snapped on her tongue/ like the tang of pickled plums") and finds a friend her age named Luke. Then Obaachan falls ill, and Sakura must return to Japan to say goodbye. She mourns, but the following spring brings her a reminder of Obaachan in her new city. With their sturdy outlines, Saburi's images look like traditional woodblock prints; her sweet, doll-headed figures and toylike landscape help take the sting out of the story's sadder moments. Weston combines a look at Japanese customs, a meditation on loss, and observations on adjusting to a new country in this wistful, low-key tale. Ages 3 7. Author's)
