Diversity The CBR17 Pie Chart Challenge
The graphic novel Uprooted: A Memoir About What Happens When Your Family Moves Back by Ruth Chan is a fun story about when your whole life is not just turned around with a move and that move is all the way across the world!
Ruth, a young teen, and her parents move to Hong Kong (her mothers hometown) from Canada when her father gets a great new job in China. If this wasn’t bad enough, her brother is staying behind in boarding school (he only has a year of school left), her father isn’t living with her and her mother most of the time due to work, Ruth’s Cantonese is weak (she understands some, but speaking is another thing), she can’t keep straight which family member is who, she has a new school to worry about (subjects like chemistry, German, and maths (did they mean math?) to deal with), making new friends (and dealing with friendship blues) and missing the old ones back in Canada. With Talk-to-Talks with her father (when they can), hearing his almost mythological birth story from him and her own patience, strength, courage and determination helps her to slowly learn that being Uprooted isn’t as horrible as it seemed at first.
The fun parallel between her fathers story (born in 1944 two months early during a time of great upheaval and war) and Ruth’s story makes “just another moving and coming of age story” interesting and fresh. The minimal detail and colored illustrations do not lack and set the story well, with some of my favorite images from the father’s story (as they contrast with the “now” (early 1990s) images. Overall, while not a WOW BEST BOOK EVER, it has moments and is a good read. Perhaps best for (strong) 8-9 to 13-(young) 14-years old