By Maureen Tai, 26 June 2018

“It was planting season, which was especially gruelling. The mud stuck to their feet like glue and each seedling had to be painstaking planted by hand.  When the hot sun burned overhead, Minli’s knees shook from weariness.” 

Minli lives a hand-to-mouth existence in a dusty brown village, nestled in the shadows of the aptly named Fruitless Mountain. The little girl is barely nourished by the grains of rice that her parents coax from the poor land.  However, her spirit is sustained by the stories that her father regales her with each evening.  These stories have been handed down like precious family heirlooms from so many generations before that they sparkle with magic and the fantastical, and surely, must be ancient figments of an overactive imagination.

Or perhaps not.

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By Maureen Tai, 8 June 2018

 “King Mansolain had a beard that spread about his feet like a rug, and on it slept a hare, the only creature that still cared for him now that King Mansolain was almost forgotten.”

My beloved copy of The King of the Copper Mountains bears teeth marks made by my first ever pet dog.  Patches was a Shih-Tzu with one blue and one brown eye. She had the unsavoury habit of tracking down cockroaches and stifling the blighters by rolling over them.  If she could have talked (and as a child, I fervently wished that she could have), I suspect she’d have had many engaging stories to tell.  Like the animals in Paul Biegel’s classic tale who come to the copper castle to keep King Mansolain alive.

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By Maureen Tai, 18 May 2018

“Like God in the Bible, they looked at what they had made and found it very good.”

The setting is a small rural community outside Washington in the 1960s. On the outside, Jesse Aarons is a hen-pecked, cow-milking, God-fearing, quietly anxious but otherwise normal fifth grader. On the inside, Jess is much more than that. He is an artist, a creator of pictures, with fragile sensitivities and complicated emotions. It takes an extraordinary friendship in the magical kingdom of Terabithia, and a tragic loss, for Jess to discover, to become, and to be accepted for the person he truly is.  Continue reading →

By Maureen Tai, 7 May 2018

“Ralph was eager, excited, curious, and impatient all at once. The emotion was so strong it made him forget his empty stomach. It was caused by those little cars, especially that motorcycle and the pb-pb-b-b-b sound the boy made. That sound seemed to satisfy something within Ralph, as if he had been waiting all his life to hear it.”

I was likely 11 or 12 when I first read The Mouse and the Motorcycle.  A bit late to the ballgame.  I still have my original Yearling copy, with the mouse mounted on the vehicle, whiskers back and tail tucked under and around his arm. The pages are yellowed and spotted with age and threaten, with each turn, to detach from the spine. I’m surprised none did back then, I read and re-read this book so often.

I adored Ralph – the mouse – and still do.

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