Navdeep Singh Dhillon

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Bringing Back Doggy Heroes and Kitty Cat Villains: El Perro Con Sombrero, a Bilingual Picture Book Review

August 21, 2015 by Navdeep Leave a Comment

Bringing Back Doggy Heroes and Kitty Cat Villains: El Perro Con Sombrero, a Bilingual Picture Book Review
El Perro Con Sombrero

El Perro Con Sombrero

El Perro Con Sombrero By Derek Taylor Kent; Illustrated by Jed Henry;
Translated by Gabriela Revilla Lugo
Rating: Five Stars!
Age Range: 5-10

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When Derek Taylor Kent, the bloke who wrote the Scary School Middle Grade series, asked me if I was interested in reviewing his picture book, El Perro Con Sombrero, I was immediately intrigued. The title told me everything I needed to know for me to want this book not to suck: it stars a dog with a sombrero, a villain cat, and it’s bilingual Spanish? Double in!

First, let’s talk about the facts of the book industry. It has not had a great dog protagonist since Old Yeller. And what happens to him at the end? The poor sod dies. A disturbing modern trend is to portray cats exclusively as the noble protagonists when they clearly make fantastic villains, like in the Russian satirical novel, Master and Margarita, in which the cat, a devil incarnate named Behemoth, is mad about guns, vodka, and has the most hilarious lines. I probably didn’t take away from the novel what I was supposed to take away from it when I read it the first time. In my defense, I was thirteen. When I read it a few years ago, I was terrified and couldn’t finish it. On that delightful note, let’s get back to this picture book for children.

The story of El Perro Con Sombrero is beautifully simple and it has a moral at the end of it. I’m not big on morals, but if it’s there and it’s not cheesy I’m down with it. I like stories that are entertaining, but in this story the moral worked and it wasn’t overly pleasant. Jed Henry’s artwork is a nice blend of mostly watercolor drawings with some digitized artwork and a distinctive old school style.

El Perro Con Sombrero

El Perro Con Sombrero

Now for the plot: a hatless dog is poor, hungry, and sad. His immediate needs are food, but ultimately he is looking for love of a family, an internal goal he doesn’t even know he has yet. A sombrero flies from a shop and lands on his head, transforming his sense of self-worth through how others now view him. Immediately he is thought of as handsome and given a juicy bone by a shopkeeper. Then a Hollywood director drives up in a droptop and offers him a job as an actor. He stars in many films, including what I think is probably the one that smashed the box office – one where he eats a habanero pepper. It’s as hilarious as it sounds. But while he has achieved all of the capitalist objectives for a happy life such as owning a big house, driving a fancy car, having lots of money and adoring fans, he is still lonely and he knows his success hinges on a hat.

El Gato con Zapatos!

El Gato con Zapatos!

The antagonist appears in the form of el Gato en zapatos, who is jealous of his success and decides to steal his sombrero. El Perro is on the verge of losing everything – all of his financial trappings and the branding of el Perro con sombrero. Naturally, a requisite chase sequence ensues as he runs after el Gato through several locations, including a supermarket where they knock things off the aisles, until he traps el Gato at the sandbox and we assume can physically overpower her enough to get the hat back. Realistically, that cat would claw his eyes out. It looks pretty vicious. This is probably why I wouldn’t get very far writing fiction for other people’s children. On the other side of the sandbox is a lovely family, who we should not think is only being welcoming because he is a famous dog, who they think has lots of money. That is how a terrible person thinks, so obviously I am not thinking any of those things. Now el Perro has a decision to make: confront el Gato and get his sombrero back so he can continue living his fancy life or go with a lovely family who is at the park.

Spoiler: he goes with the family. And in a nice little twist, the family also adopts the cat, ending with a shot of the whole family on the sofa.

The icing on the cake is that diversity is handled with lovely subtle touches. Not bad for a book about a dog and a hat.

As a Papa who doesn’t speak much Spanish, I’ve read a few Spanglish books like Little Roja Riding Hood. I liked the simplicity of the Spanish in this  bilingual book. I had to read it once on my own so I could pass myself off as an authority to my five year-old who is on the verge of not needing me to read to her at all, a day I’m not looking forward to, and prolonging for as long as I can. It’s lighthearted, fun, and if you’re into morals, there is one at the end. If you’re not, it’s a fun read. But what I especially liked is that the Spanish is very accessible to kids and parents who don’t speak Spanish super fluently.

Visit Derek Taylor Kent (@DerekTaylorKent) at www.DerekTaylorKent.com and for some kickass illustrations by Jed Henry (@theJedHenry), including his love of tigers, visit http://jedhenry.tumblr.com.

Filed Under: Lit Life, Reviews Tagged With: bilingual books, book blog, book blogger, book reviews, Derek Taylor Kent, el perro con sombrero, Gabriela Revilla Lugo, Jed Henry, kid lit, Kindergarten, picture books, Pre-K, spanish

Support #DadsRead and #WeNeedDiverseBooks Because Reading to Your Kids is Fun!

June 4, 2014 by Navdeep Singh Dhillon Leave a Comment

Support #DadsRead and #WeNeedDiverseBooks Because Reading to Your Kids is Fun!
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I read X-Men to my kids because knowing Storm is from Kenya will probably be on the SATs.

I was at our local park in Jersey City with Kavya and Shaiyar the other day and saw a dad with his laptop open sitting on the bench, his eyes fully engaged with whatever was on his computer screen. His daughter was about seven, and she would run up to him every few minutes and he’d wildly gesture with his elbows, his hands never leaving the keyboard, indicating he thought he was doing some really important work stuff. More important than her. I would have liked to have gone up to this guy and slapped him in the face, flung his laptop across the playground, stomped on it, and told him to be free, just like that scene in Braveheart.

Instead, I sat there, feeling sorry. Not just for the little girl, but for the dad, at all he was missing out on at the playground, and probably at home. It takes a pretty committed workaholic to bring a laptop to the park, especially when you’re watching your kid. Maybe he reads to his kid, but I somehow doubt it. Even though most people don’t talk about it, Dad Guilt does exist. When I teach evening classes or have to bail on reading to Kavya, telling her stories, or taking her to the bookstore, it sucks. More so because I see the look in her eyes when she says half-heartedly, That’s okay, Papa.

An article in the Telegraph recently caught my attention, not for the statistics about dads who don’t enjoy reading bedtime stories (only 19 per cent of young fathers say they enjoy reading with their children), but because of the title: Dads Who Don’t Read To Their Kids Are Idiots. It’s easy to characterize these dads as ones who just don’t care and make dads who already read to their kids feel good about themselves. The challenge is engaging all dads, including dads who don’t read, or dads who feel awkward reading aloud in silly voices (let’s face it, the silly voice thing is mandatory). When my students tell me they don’t like to write or they find reading fiction boring and pointless, my response is not to call them idiots, but to find a way to encourage them and make it enticing for them to want to do it.

In the 1980s, the Russian Government had some propaganda program in India, where they supplied Russian literature for incredibly cheap prices, so whenever we would go to Punjab, I would stock up on Russian books, with gorgeous artwork, like the Firebird, five books with a protagonist named Yuri, Fables, and one where the Sun and the wind have a bet to see who can make a man remove his coat and hat. The wind blows and blows, only making the man hold tighter to his clothing, then the sun comes along and the man voluntarily removes his hat and coat. It’s a great principal for teaching methodology, or really anything in life, and applies here as well. Dads who the statistics are talking about, the ones who don’t enjoy reading, or those who don’t read to their kids at all, are not idiots.This is why the #DadsRead campaign is so exciting because every dad is encouraged to continue reading to their kids or just get started.

My 4-year-old recently picked up a Superman book set at our local bookshop in Jersey City – WORD,  to teach kids how to read, filled with sight words and vocabulary like KRYPTONITE. She can make out the letters, and is on the verge of figuring out how words function. I’m excited about the day that happens, but also a bit sad because if she’s anything like me and my wife, she’s going to be that kid with the flashlight under the covers. The kid who wants to sit for hours by herself, immersed in the world created by fiction.

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This baby speaks the truth

We Need Diverse Books Because I am Totally Relatable As An Ass-Kicking Princess

This is also true.

For more information on the #DadsRead campaign and how YOU can participate, click HERE

For more information on the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign, click HERE

When I first heard about The #DadsRead Campaign created by Tom Burns over at The Goodmen Project and Jordan Lloyd Bookey, who runs Zoobean, a children’s app and book curation service, I was immediately on board. Not because of Tom’s quest to build a library for his daughter, although his Wonder Woman post, with kickass old school and out-of-print recommendations, definitely helped. It wasn’t because the campaign came in just in time for Father’s day, or because sponsors like the Huffington Post Parents, along with Zoobean, and several others stepped up to support the #DadsRead iniative. Even the Twitter party with CASH MONEY PRIZES did not entice me. Okay, maybe a bit. Fine, I’m doing it because of the Twitter party.

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Look at those muscles!

Bottom line is I love reading to my daughter, and even though my 3-month-old son is more interested in eating his own foot than following any plot line, I love instilling a culture of storytelling. My parents were incredibly busy working, studying, traveling, and didn’t read all that much to me and my sister, but we grew up in a home where stories were cherished, at all times of the day, whenever they could make it work. Folktales from Punjab like Chiri the Kahn, with caste violence metaphors lost on us, Russian folktales about Baba Yaga, the super creepy witch who lived in a house built on chicken legs.  In Nigeria, when the electricity would go out, we’d huddle with my parents as they told us stories, and it was hell when the lights came back on because that meant the stories were rushed to an unfulfilling ending. In England, everytime it rained, there would be special stories. So, pretty much everyday.

My sister, who is five years older than me, loved reading to me. Because she mostly read me books she liked. Mrs. Pepperpot, My Naughty Little Sister, Badger Girl, Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton mysteries, Chronicles of Narnia. Sometimes she’d read me the Three Billy Goats Gruff. When I was older, and we lived in Dubai, Mum and Dad weren’t quite so busy, they would take the time to read me books in Punjabi and Hindi, like the Panchtantra, Birbal the witty, Jawab Natpatlal, and some wonderful Hindi comics from Sikh history, Hindu mythology, all from the power house of Indian comics: Amar Chitra Katha.

With my little family, I’ve attempted to replicate this home culture of telling stories, and read books. Physical books, the ones you can touch and feel and smell. I recently bought her a Leap Pad, which is great, but it’s no book and Kavya knows it. She likes playing on the iPad, but she loves books. And I want that to continue. If I can’t read to Kavya at bedtime, I’ll find other times to read to her, sometimes in the middle of the day, on car rides, on the train, on walks. Or we’ll go to the park with sandwiches and a bag of almonds for the crappiest picnic ever, which she really enjoys, and I’ll read to her. Reading to my 4-year-old is just a natural progression. She wants to read all kinds of stories and I get to introduce new worlds to her.

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Arrrrr!

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Ms. Marvel is from Jersey City!

At the beginning of the year, Kavya was utterly distraught she didn’t have yellow hair like Rapunzel and that her favourite characters didn’t look like her. Read the blog post about it HERE and on the Good Men Project. Storytelling to the rescue! She slowly realized stories can be manipulated. A princess doesn’t have to be just one thing. She doesn’t have to be rescued. She doesn’t have to be white. The dragon can be kind. A princess can be a pirate. Boys can like the color pink if they want to. Doc McStuffins can make a cameo appearance in Snow White. And yes, the princess can even be a little brown girl just like her (thanks Super Why, Ms. Marvel, and recommendations from #WeNeedDiverseBooks!).

On Free Comic Book Day, just the two of us took the train out to New York and loaded up on comics Kavya chose by herself, starting with Batman and Wonder Woman, returning to Jersey City only to see the REAL Batman hanging out at our local comic book store! Then she picked out a copy of Ms. Marvel, a brown teenaged shape shifter from Jersey City. I am a comic book maniac and I’m really excited she is on her way to being one too.

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Free Comic Book Day!

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Kavya’s first library card!

If you’re a Papa who isn’t sure what the first step is, here are two things you should do:

1. GET THEE TO THE PLACE OF MAGIC!
Take your kid to the most magical place in the world: the library. Spend a chunk of time there. Let them explore the children’s section, read them books, and don’t dictate what you think they should be reading. Unless they start wandering into the Academic section. Get them out of there quickly! That’s how it starts. Then they’ll start burbling on incoherently, referencing people like Homi Bhaba, and using terms like structuralism and the confusing as hell, “one,” when what they mean is, “you.” Let them check out one or two books with their own library card. If they don’t have one, even better! Get them one and let them take out any age appropriate book from the children’s section, even if it’s a comic book. There’s nothing like the thrill of receiving your first library card, of feeling independent and checking out your own book, of being surrounded by stories from all over the world. Switch your damn phone off and if you’re going to the park, leave your laptop at home or some lunatic dad might just fling it across the playground, stomp on it, slap you in the face, and start quoting lines from Braveheart in an exaggerated Scottish accent.

2. BUY BOOKS FROM AN INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE!
The most boring way to get a book you think your kid will like is to sit at your computer, google some reading lists, and click a link to amazon with express shipping. Instead, use google to find some Independent Bookstores in your area. The reason I love independent bookshops is because they have personal recommendations, often from employees, and don’t just buy books that have made it onto some national list.

We live in Jersey City, where we are fortunate to live a few blocks from WORD Bookstore, a fantastic independent bookstore, and we are a short train ride away from many bookstores in New York City, including Books of Wonder, New York’s largest and oldest bookstore devoted just to kids! Everywhere we travel, we make it a point to find an independent bookstore and a library. We found them in Atlantic City, and took Kavya to a Kwanza book event and craft making thing at the Atlantic City library!

Seek out independent bookstores in your area and support authors you want to read more of, as well as awesome bookstores by buying from them. Especially diverse books and combine the #DadsRead and #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtags to zoom past the mediocre dads, and go straight for the Awesome-Ass Dad Award. It comes with a check for 1 billion dollars. Also, there’s the feeling of love, self-confidence, and the sparkle in your child’s eye. Or you could just do it for the BILLION DOLLARS!

I will be blogging here about books I’m reading to my kids, including some Punjabi, Hindi, and Spanish ones, comic books, graphic novels, picture books, and will make more of an effort to expand our library to include more diverse books. No matter what I read or when I read to them, it will no doubt be lots of fun. Groucho Marx puts it best: “If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.”

Leave a comment below with books or authors you’d recommend I read to my 4 year old, and if you’re a blogger, put a link. 

I’m not nearly as violent as this post made me sound. It’s the media, always sensationalizing things. You know the game they play. Find me:

Navdeep Singh Dhillon on Facebook: FB is my phrand.
Instagram (@navdeepsinghdhillon): I immortalize my food before eating it, even if that means my children go hungry. That’s how committed I am to instagram. I also immortalize books before eating them. I’m perfectly sane. Follow me if you know what’s good for you. Or else. Only kidding. Haha. LOL. ROFLMAO.
Twitter (@navdeep_dhillon): My best phrand.

Shortlink: http://goo.gl/D7F0yL

Filed Under: Lit Life, Parenting Tagged With: Amar Chitra Katha, books, Dads, Dads who read, dadsread, Fathers Day, independent bookstores, Jersey City, kid lit, library, literacy, NYC, Panchtantra, parenting, picture books, Punjabi children's books, reading, the good men project, WORD bookstore, zoobean

Join the #WeNeedDiverseBooks Twitter Party and Stay For VONA’s Anthology #Dismantle Launch Party!

May 1, 2014 by Navdeep Singh Dhillon Leave a Comment

Join the #WeNeedDiverseBooks Twitter Party and Stay For VONA’s Anthology #Dismantle Launch Party!

I’ll just come out with it: Young Adult and Middle Grade authors are total badasses when it comes to rocking social media, especially on twitter. They don’t just join in conversations, they make conversations happen, and know what they’re doing with #those damn hashtags, which I still refer to sometimes as the number or pound sign. All I need is a rotary phone and a typewriter with lots of white-out.

One of the things I’ve been most impressed by is how well they build and foster writing communities, whether it’s online or whatever the opposite of online is. Offline? The first day after my wife, Sona Charaipotra, began her MFA at the New School’s Writing for Children program, she and her classmates started a group blog, Teen Writer’s Bloc, influenced by a previous year’s group blog, the Longstockings (read Ode to the Longstockings) with Jenny Han and lots of now well known writers; the eventual goal was to create a social platform to promote each other’s books.

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The Girls who like CAKE!

Just before they graduated, Sona and Dhonielle then co-founded CAKE Literary, a book packaging company focused on diversity, and they’re also part of the Fearless Fifteeners, a community of Middle Grade and Young Adult authors debuting in 2015.

Just last week, I wrote this post about how my 3 year-old daughter understands the silent power of institutional racism, and wants “yellow” hair. I really thought I had a bit more time!

I was very excited to hear about #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement that Ellen Oh, along with some other writers decided was well overdue. I don’t know the specifics of what or how it went down, but the BEA’s all white panels at Book Con definitely helped. So thanks for that. In all fairness, they did attempt to add diversity with the cat. Last year me and Sona went to AWP in Boston, where panel after panel were composed entirely of white people because brown writers can’t talk about things like plot and weaving in history into fiction. But Global Conflict, that we can talk about.  The diversity, of course, shouldn’t end with color and should take into account any community that is marginalized, and the fact this hashtag has been trending since yesterday is awesome. These issues are certainly not new and people have been experiencing them and talking about hem for years. In the past few weeks, specifically in kid lit, there have been some much needed outrage, with articles discussing the staggering statistics of just how much we don’t matter. Here’s a great roundup by Book Riot. 

The problem arises with the definition of the term, “diversity.” It’s rare, at least in my social circle, to hear someone say they’re against diversity in books. It’s the equivalent of saying you’re pro-racism. It takes a rare breed of shithead to voice this position. But a lot of people are comfortable with diversity as long as it stays in its place: history lessons in stories set during the civil rights era, or in exotic lands, but in high concept stories like mysteries, fantasy, science fiction, and princess narratives, there isn’t a place for POC – People of Color. We either don’t matter enough to exist in these worlds of reality or mythical lands, or we’re relegated to marginal roles.

In creative writing workshops during my MFA, workshops I’ve taken in the City, and a year long fellowship at the CUNY Writing Institute, I’ve had instructors and fellow students, sometimes who are brown themselves, tell me my character needs to be more exotic, or the foreign terms need to all be translated into English. In creative writing classes I teach, no matter how diverse my students, their stories are always filled with white protagonists because that’s the world they’ve seen. Even in worlds that don’t exist yet. And it’s incredibly sad.

What I love about this movement is that it’s very inclusive and applicable to many genres, including literary fiction. I hold a special place for short stories; I love anthologies, whether they’re American or Australian; mystery or science fiction. But after I read these anthologies, I’m always struck by the obvious: there are either no writers of color, or it’s the same incredibly famous writers of color that appear in every anthology. There’s no effort being placed into finding anyone else, unlike the white authors who appear page after page. I’ve lost count how many writing panels I’ve been to where writers have all been white and often male (like Book Expo). Since January, I’ve read several anthologies, some of them a few years old, like J.M. Coetzee’s, “New Writing from Southern Africa,” where there is not a single black voice (South friggin Africa!), or Best American Short Stories with Joyce Carol Oates, also predominantly white.

Thankfully, today is not only officially Day One of the #WeNeedDiverseBooks Campaign, it is also the launch date of  the official Dismantle release, a VONA anthology comprised of past and current students and faculty members, including Junot Diaz. I will be attending a fiction workshop at VONA this summer with him and was already excited about it, and then I read this brilliant intro by him about the MFA vs People of Color and can’t help but think and speak in cliches. I’ll write more about this in another post. Here’s a tiny excerpt:

“Some of you understand completely. And some of you ask: Too white … how? Too white as in Cornell had almost no POC—no people of color—in it. Too white as in the MFA had no faculty of color in the fiction program—like none—and neither the faculty nor the administration saw that lack of color as a big problem. (At least the students are diverse, they told us.) Too white as in my workshop reproduced exactly the dominant culture’s blind spots and assumptions around race and racism (and sexism and heteronormativity, etc).”

vona_cover_draft-1DISMANTLE ANTHOLOGY
“Dismantle is an anthology of creative work from VONA alumni and its award-winning teachers including: Chris Abani, Nikky Finney, Maaza Mengiste, Minal Hajratwala, Justin Torres, Cristina Garcia, Mat Johnson, Laila Lalami, Mitchell Jackson and many more.” Join the conversation on twitter at 9 EST using the hashtag #‎Dismantle‬, @voicesatvona, @threadblanket this evening,  May 1. (9:00-10:30PM) EST.

#WeNeedDiverseBooks is a three day event, just like Coachella, except without so many white people, and you don’t have to travel so far! It sounds like lots of fun, with plenty of opportunity to raise some noise:

Check out their Tumblr for a proper breakdown. Here’s what’s happening today:

Day One
May 1st. Make signs on paper, cardboard, on whiteboard, with notebook paper, really anything you like, using #WeNeedDiverseBooks. Take a photo and email ONE photo to: weneeddiversebooks@yahoo.com. Starting May 2, it will be shared on their tumblr. And make sure you’re reblogging, and social media-ing it up! For explosive results, combine this hashtag with #Dismantle.

Here are two of a million reasons We Need Diverse Books:

We Need Diverse Books Because I am Totally Relatable As An Ass-Kicking Princess

We Need Diverse Books Because I am Totally Relatable As An Ass-Kicking Princess

We Need Diverse Books Because I'm Way Too Cute Not To Be The Protagonist.

We Need Diverse Books Because I’m Way Too Cute Not To Be The Protagonist.

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Filed Under: Lit Life Tagged With: #WeNeedDiverseBooks, Apartheid of Children's Literature, Book Riot, Cake Literary, craft, diversity, kid lit, Sona Charaipotra, VONA, writers of color, writing, YA

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I Got This

about I write fiction. I am a Papa. That pretty much sums up what I blog about here. I am a contributing writer for Mom.me and was featured on The Stir's 2013 list of 10 Best Dad Bloggers. I have an MFA in creative writing and teach fiction and literature in NYC. I read. You should too. Read more about me.

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