Puss Reboots: Blog: July 2008: Child of the Owl

Recent posts

Academic Discourse at Havana by Wallace Stevens
All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor
Arabella by Georgette Heyer
The Big Pony Race by Erica David
Blue Hat, Green Hat by Sandra Boynton
Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold
Bye-Bye, Big Bad Bullybug by Ed Emberley
Camp Buccaneer by Pam Smallcomb
Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks
Child of the Owl by Lawrence Yep
Creole Ladies, Marti the Smuggler, Bullfighting by Maturin M. Ballou
Cuban Sketches (excerpt) by James Steele
Dancing Above the Waves by Susan Walerstein
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
Evergreen by Belva Plain
Enfant Terrible by Scott Dalrymple
Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor
Flight of the Goose by Lesley Thomas
The Frog Prints by B. L. Harwick
Fullbrim's Finding by Matthew Hughes
A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis
Havana Letter by William Cullen Bryant
If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff
King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
LoveHampton by Sherri Rifkin
Marlin off the Morro by Ernest Hemingway
The Minister's Wooing by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
My Pet Virus by Shawn Decker
Nana Volume 1 by Ai Yazawa
Native Tongue by Carl Hiaasen
The Penthouse Mystery by Ellery Queen
Reader's Guide by Lisa Goldstein
Red as Blood by Tanith Lee
The Roberts by Michael Blumlein
The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
Sea Gift by John Ashby
Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott
Singing to Cuba (excerpt) by Margarita Engle
Spiders and Scorpions: A Look Inside Series by P. D. Hillyard
Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself by Alan Alda
Unholy Domain by Dan Ronco
Virus Games by G. L. Sheerin
Zen of Fish by Trevor Corson

Miscellaneous:
Good Thing We Didn't Have Any Plans

Previous month

Child of the Owl: 07/16/08

Laurence Yep has been a favorite author of mine since my teens. I have been reading his books when I've had the opportunity. My local library has a huge collection of his novels and I've decided to work my way through them as time permits. Child of the Owl (1977) is my first revisiting of Yep in about a decade and I'm currently reading Sea Glass (1979).

Child of the Owl is told in the first person perspective of a 12 year old girl named Casey. She's a native born Chinese American but doesn't even think of herself in terms of her Chinese heritage. Like many first generation native born Americans, she only speaks English. Just as Yep describes in his autobiography The Lost Garden (1996), Casey is "too American to fit into Chinatown, and too Chinese to fit in anywhere else." In fact, that turmoil of balancing cultures is a recurrent theme in Yep's books.

The book, though written in the 1970s, takes place in 1965. When Casey is forced to move in with her Grandmother, Paw-Paw, in Chinatown (San Francisco) we get to learn about Chinese culture as Casey does. All of Yep's descriptions of San Francisco have a delicate balance of Western and Chinese details. The Beatles, old time radio shows, and hamburgers coincide with Chinese opera, Kung fu movies and dim sum.