Julie wakes one morning to the \u201cBANG \/ CRASH \/ BOOOOM\u201d of the Chinese opera \u201cthundering from the TV\u201d while Poh Poh practices her sword dancing. Julie has so many questions. Over egg tarts in Chinatown, Poh Poh spins stories of growing up in China, where Cantonese opera performers frequented her father\u2019s tea house. When her father stopped paying her school fees\u2014\u201cThere\u2019s no use educating a girl. You\u2019ll be married off soon enough\u201d\u2014she found nurturing teachers among the performers. At last, she joined them on stage after intensive training with her sword; she recalls how as a performer she could be \u201ccommanding, brave, and bold\u2014things I could not be in my real life.\u201d But bold she was, eventually traveling to the other side of the world and escaping the \u201csky demons dropping bombs.\u201d Safe from war, she built a life in Gun San (as many Cantonese people referred to North America) that eventually allowed Julie to \u201clearn to read and write and dance and sing and dream.\u201d Hune-Brown\u2019s upbeat, affectionate picture-book debut is rooted in a CBC Radio documentary she made about her grandmother. Lowe\u2019s vibrant illustrations, rendered in pencil, watercolor, and Procreate, extend the text with enticing details: family photos, favorite ducks both plushy and real, and identifiable Toronto. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Julie wakes one morning to the \u201cBANG \/ CRASH \/ BOOOOM\u201d of the Chinese opera \u201cthundering from the TV\u201d while Poh Poh practices her sword dancing. Julie has so many questions. Over egg tarts in Chinatown, Poh Poh spins stories of growing up in China, where Cantonese opera performers frequented her father\u2019s tea house. When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7300,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7299"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}