In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson

A lovely little story of a Chinese girl who moves to America in the 1940s and discovers her love for the Brooklyn Dodgers. One of my favorites growing up, and it still has a place of honor on my bookshelf. <333......more

This is a positively charming and delightful book for elementary and middle school children. Long a favorite of one of my granddaughters, I finally reserved it from the library so we could discuss it. I can understand why she loves it. She has been studying Chinese in a dual-language program since k......more

I LOVED this book when I was a kid. I think I must have read it five or six times. A recent immigrant, Shirley Temple Wong reminds me of Francie Nolan from A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. Both characters are somewhat naive and get bullied by the other kids when they try to fit in. It's a remarkably poigna......more

This story chronicles an immigrant experience during the mid-1940s. A Chinese girl changes her name to Shirley Temple Wong when she learns that she and her mother will join her engineer father in multicultural Brooklyn, New York. She arrives with lots of enthusiasm and no English language skills. The......more

First Middle Grade March read 2022. I loved this! I love that it starts with Shirley in China. It’s such a vivid picture of the closeness of her clan there and the wholly different culture with its own values, names, and rhythms. To Shirley, the year is the Year of the Boar. Shirley’s father has gone......more