Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday March 30, 2011
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THE WRITING LIFE
Esmeralda Santiago
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ISBN NA
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Reviewed by Esmeralda Santiago
The first phrase I learned in English was "I'm sorry, so sorry," the only words I could make out in a song then popular on the radio. The rest of the ballad was a garble in a female voice quavering with remorse. I was 13 and about to learn that love meant having to say you're sorry over and over again.
That summer Mami decided to leave Puerto Rico for the United States. As Papi drove us to the airport, he sang along with Brenda Lee on the radio.
"What does the song say?" I asked.
"Lo siento," Papi said. "Lo siento tanto."
Mami sat next to him, lips taut. She'd spent two weeks in New York before deciding to move there. Did she understand what Brenda Lee was helping my father say to her? Papi had chosen to send us away rather than marry her. After we waved goodbye that afternoon, neither Mami, nor I, nor my six sisters and brothers would see him again for eight years.
Brooklyn was a reader's delight. The streets were labeled, the buildings numbered. Neon signs hissed and flashed over storefronts.
Shadowed letters curved across plate glass windows: OPEN, CLOSED, CHECKS CASHED. Messages were scrawled over the mailboxes in the lobby of our apartment building: FOR RENT, FOR SALE, KEEP DOOR CLOSED. Posters stretched across the sides of buses, billboards loomed over roofs while smaller ones slid into channels over the seats of subway cars. COME TO MARLBORO COUNTRY, DO NOT LEAN ON THIS DOOR, NO ANIMALS ALLOWED.
But for the occasional SE HABLA ESPANOL, most of the signs were a jumble of advertising, warnings and, sometimes, necessary information. NO STANDING, NO LOITERING, NO ENTRY, PULL HERE FOR EMERGENCY BRAKE. More mysterious were the graffiti sprayed on walls, scratched through layers of paint on the steel beams holding up the tracks of the elevated train, or carved in deep furrows on wooden school desks. I eventually learned they were curses.
The brick building near our school was a public library. The librarian, a rosy-cheeked woman with a platinum beehive, took down the address from the electric and gas bills sent to Mami that proved we lived in the neighborhood.
"Your name?"
"Esmeralda Santiago."
"I'm sorry?"
I spoke slowly, but she didn't understand. She handed me a scrap of paper, and I wrote in the looped cursive taught in Puerto Rico's public schools.
She printed my name on a card. The 17 letters marched across in increasingly smaller blocks until the final "o" was punctuation.
Library cards, I thought, were designed for people with short, American names like Dick, Jane and Sally.
I ambled up and down the aisles, but none of the books was in Spanish. In the children's reading room, a group had gathered at the feet of another librarian, who read and then turned the book so that the children could see the illustrations. I knelt at the back and listened to the story and saw that the drawings explained the text. This is how American children learn English, I thought, by looking at picture books.
After the reading, I borrowed as many alphabet books as I was allowed. At home, I studied the drawings and memorized the names of things. "A" was for Apple, "B" for Boy, "C" for Car, "D" for Dog, "E" for Elephant. In my favorite books, all the words were related to each other. Apple, Banana, Carrot were in the book about Fruits. Doctor, Entertainer, Fireman were in Jobs.
"Z" was almost always Zebra, even in the book about fruits, although in the one about jobs it was for Zookeeper.
When humid August turned to cool September to brisk October, I memorized the words for boots, coat, mittens and snow. When cold November rains drenched my siblings and me on the way to or from school, I remembered sneeze, fever, ambulance, nurse, doctor and hospital.
I mentally labeled everything within sight until my head was full of nouns. Then I graduated from alphabet to chapter books with an English to English dictionary alongside, reasoning that every time I looked up a word in English I could learn a few more. By the time I started ninth grade a year after we arrived in Brooklyn, I was reading at a 10th grade level.
I could read, understand and spell the words but was afraid to speak them. In Spanish, every vowel and consonant has one specific sound; in English, the same vowel could have different sounds: the "a" in apple or apex, for example. The "i" in I or ennui.
Consonants were sometimes silent, and sometimes not. I should never say keh-nee-feh for knife or pee-see-sholo-jeest for psychologist.
During my first two years in New York, I was silent, although I had acquired an impressive vocabulary.
My tongue refused to form the "th" sound. I practiced tongue twisters to help develop the necessary muscles: I thought a thought, but the thought I thought wasn't the thought I thought I thought.
My tortured diphthongs and confused vowels were a constant embarrassment, but a source of mirth to others. To avoid the laughter, I smiled as if I, too, thought it was funny. Later, I hunched over notebooks, writing out my frustration, shame and rage.
I lived in those pages, in English and Spanish, where the written word said what I couldn't utter.
Reading gave me language. Writing gave me a place to be myself. By the time I returned to Puerto Rico for a visit, I could read the most challenging literature in English and managed modern American slang with few stumbles. I had learned an entirely new Anglophone way of life even as my roots remained firmly planted in Spanish. "A" is for Apple, "M" is for Mango. I'm a hybrid, straddling two cultures, two languages, two lives, celebrating the growth that is inherent in all this, but aware, too, that there have been losses. "I'm sorry, so sorry." That first phrase I learned, so full of regret, still lingers.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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Reviewed by Liz Seymour
For generations, reading a picture book worked one way: Place a child on your lap, crack the book's spine, turn the pages and begin narrating the story of Curious George, Max and the wild things or Sam-I-am and his dislike of a certain breakfast.
Now that ritual has been upended by the soaring popularity of young children's book apps for the iPad. Earlier this week, eight of the top 10 paid book apps on iTunes were picture books. Today's digital-native children seem keenly interested in a story told to them on a 10-inch screen with a finger's swipe to reach the next page.
But wait, there's more: Pop-ups! Music! Puzzles! Matching games! You can hear a background of squeals during "Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed" (Oceanhouse Media, $2.99). With classic Dr. Seuss books, you touch an object on the screen and its name appears 3-D-like as a narrator sounds it out.
It's a different experience for the reader used to bound books. Will they soon be obsolete as children crave more than just text from their stories? Parents also like the convenience of whipping out an iPad to entertain a bored child. As the tablet's popularity soars, predictions of the picture-book industry's doom are inevitable.
But industry experts, including Jewell Stoddard, a children's book buyer at Politics and Prose in Northwest Washington (D.C.), are not convinced that the rise of iPad picture book apps means the demise of book publishing. Stoddard reads four newspapers a day on her iPad, but no books. "For one thing, the interactive features are very distracting," she says.
Carisa Kluver, editor and founder of Digital Storytime, a three-month-old website that reviews children's book apps, says digital and paper books play an equally important role in her home. As bedtime nears, her 4-1/2-year-old son, Van, will ask:
"Can I have two iPad books and three regular books tonight?"
Kluver says she spends about three hours with every children's book iPad app she reviews, rating each one on animation, sound quality and readability, among other characteristics. The best apps, she says, don't let interactive features get in the way of a good plot.
"It's got to tell a story that is meaningful after all the bells and whistles have stopped," she says. She gives low ratings to apps that stop the book in the middle of a story to play a matching game or provide some other distraction. "That's for after," she says. She also resists book apps that are overly produced with the same "20 seconds of music played in the background over and over again."
Here are a few picture book apps worth downloading:
1. "The Going to Bed Book" (Loud Crow Interactive, $2.99)
Sandra Boynton's first digital book app is faithful to the board book experience, with interactive pop-ups on every page, almost too many. But children will love touching the hot water faucet and seeing the screen fill up with steam.
2. Dr. Seuss classics (Oceanhouse Media, $1.99 to $3.99). More than a dozen are available for download, including "The Cat in the Hat," "Hop on Pop," "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "The Lorax." Lots of pop-up words on every page may distract some children, but the words also may inspire early readers. Either way, the animation and narration are cool.
3. "Miss Spider's Tea Party" (Callaway Digital Arts, $7.99)
The lonely spider in the title doesn't understand why bugs don't want to hang out with her. This app has beautiful animation and a slew of interactive features, including puzzles and matching games that won't distract the reader. Kluver gives it a less enthusiastic review, describing the narration as "syrupy" and nixing the plot. "It creeps me out a little that she wants to serve them tea," she says. "The other bugs should be afraid of her."
4. "PopOut! The Tale of Peter Rabbit" (Loud Crow Interactive, $3.99)
This beautiful app comes as close to a pop-up book on a screen as is possible. Slide the tabs and watch Peter squeeze back and forth under Mr. McGregor's garden gate. Touch Peter or one of his siblings, and they'll squeal or gurgle. British narration and soft piano music strike the right tone.
5. "Teddy's Night and Teddy's Day" (Auryn, $3.99 each)
These two apps have many interactive features you won't be able to resist before swiping to the next page. Despite that, they are sweet stories narrated by a little girl who reveals her teddy bear's secret doings. The animation is full of vivid primary colors to dazzle the youngest readers.
Liz Seymour is editor of The Washington Post's Local Living section. She can be reached at seymourl(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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