From: Carmela Martino <carmelamartino>
Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 16:02:14 -0500

Hi Everyone,

I receive my emails in digest form, so I'm a bit behind in this discussion. As the daughter of Italian immigrants myself, I'm finding the wealth of books available now encouraging. I've always been an avid reader, but I never saw any immigrant families in the books I read as a girl. That fact served to reinforce my own feelings of being an outsider. Now, as an adult, I still relate to stories of young people from other cultures. Two of my favorite books are ESPERANZA RISING by Pam Munoz Ryan and a short story collection edited by Donald Gallo called FIRST CROSSING: STORIES OF TEEN IMMIGRANTS. I shared the short story collection with a Cambodian friend and she loved it too, saying that Minfong Ho, the author of a story in the collection about a Cambodian girl, "got it just right."

I can also relate to Deborah Hopkinson's comments regarding responses by students to historical photographs. When I speak in schools, I often talk about the black and white photograph of an immigrant family on the cover of my novel, ROSA, SOLA, and I show them a photograph of my mother on a boat coming to America in 1953. When I ask students to guess the time periods of these photographs, there answers have ranged from 1785 to the 1970s.


Carmela Martino www.carmelamartino.com ROSA, SOLA (Candlewick Press)
Received on Wed 09 May 2007 04:02:14 PM CDT