By Maureen Tai, 30 November 2018
“A lot would never have happened if I’d handed over a lemon sherbet that day.” – Michael.
When a place and a time are suffused with equal measures of gladness and sorrow, should one, when the opportunity arises, revisit it? Or leave the past well alone, buried in the hazy mists of memories? In Homecoming, a middle-aged man struggles with this decision, only to be drawn back into his boyhood days from fifty years ago, to the village where he and his mother used to live, and where, by the edge of a wild and glorious marsh, he made an unlikely friend in Mrs. Pettigrew. As he reminisces, he wistfully recounts the unusual but ultimately tragic story of lives irrevocably altered by that fearsome weapon of humankind known as Progress.
Do you remember the muddled-up feelings that you experienced on your first day of school? A concoction of fear and joy, excitement and anxiety, freedom and homesickness? I do. And so does the newly built Frederick Douglass Elementary school, the unexpected narrator in the whimsical and clever School’s First Day of School. This is the perfect picture book to read with a pre-schooler whose first day is looming. What will School’s first day be like? 
By Maureen Tai, 24 November 2018
I am proud to say that I discovered Hilda in her original comic form a few years before she became a Netflix phenomenon. Was it her blue hair, blowing freely in the breeze or her wide round eyes that appealed to me? Or was it the quirky creatures of her world: the creature made of wood with its round bald head completely separated from its tree-stump-like body? the snowy white fox with tiny antlers? the gigantic stone troll with its gaping toothy maw? Or was it the feel of the comic book, its surprising lightness and pages reminiscent of construction paper?
Stories That Stay With Us 