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This is me reading at APT9 Summer Festival on the GOMA LawnA special moment in front of sign with my name on it! Also meeting the Kiribati community. I travelled to Kiribati when I was twenty so it was lovely to see them storytelling at the festival as well.Checking out the Bollywood dancing. Fantastic fun. All families especially into it.Meeting two Papua New Guinea ladies, Veronica from the Bouganville Brisbane community and a Papua New Guinea lady resident in Brisbane learning PNG weaving. This reminded me of my days in Tully with my Vanuatu and Aboriginal friend, crafting and chatting. Although today I just watched.Debut of the Brolga poem. It went so well this day. Here we are being brolgas.The two hand puppets. Must do a post on them all on their own. Thanks so much to David Perkins for making these. So happy with how they came out.Very special to have my poetry auslan translated for two of the performances by Maree from Deaf Services, Queensland.
I read some Magic Fish Dreaming poems as well as a poem inspired by Sydney Long’s painting Spirit of the Plains daily over the three days of the festival.
It was so much fun to share these poems and the story behind their inspirations.
I loved performing my new ‘Brolga’ poem and ‘Cassowary Chat’ with the help of the children and two home made puppets.
Some other poems performed were ‘Giggle Poems’, ‘Curtain Fig Tree’, ‘River Song’,’Brahminy Kite’, ‘Discovering Magic’, and ‘Magic Fish Dreaming.’ I varied it a little each day, but performed the participatory puppet poems every day!
The setting by the river under the shade of a tree was just perfect, and cool and comfortable for families.
Thank you so much to all those families who stopped to listen and participate in the storytelling.
A big thanks to Laura, Roshni, David and my family for their supports on the day and Hannah for support in the lead up. As well as to Maree from Deaf Services Queensland, for her Auslan of the poems.
Working hard towards some new poems, and especially keen to include the Brolga poem in a new collection for children.
Whilst the festival is over, the exhibition continues and you can find out more here. APT9 DETAILS
The Latte Rebellion by Sarah Jamila Stevenson, published by Flux, Northstar Editions, 2011, ebook USD 2.99 paperback USD 9.95, ISBN 0738722782, 336 pages, Winner of A 2011 Bronze Medal IPPY Winner in YA/Multicultural (Independent Publishers Book Awards). Florida Teens Read List 2013 – 2014, Scholastic Book Club Selection.
The Latte Rebellion is a coming of age story, tackling: social justice, friendship, prejudice, social movements, and identity diaspora packaged in a highly accessible and tightly written novel for teens. Asha’s teen struggles are particularly relatable to readers acutely aware of their multiple cultural heritages and who wish to remain true to them all, whilst engaging in a global society and wanting to make a difference. But like many other teens she is: wanting to retain her best friend; interested in romance and travel; and longing to find her true purpose in life.
Asha’s journey to find her true self, is at the heart of this book, but the story is not a pedestrian one, instead we learn that Asha and a couple of her friends started a tshirt Latte Rebellion project, to create more understanding of multiracial students, which spirals into an out of control social movement, which will ultimately challenge friendships, and everything Asha thinks she is as well as alter her life’s future path. This situation elevates this novel above typical light teen novels and takes it into the realm of a deeper book, tackling serious issues relevant to youth today.
Published in 2011, this novel is still highly relevant, in relating the power of feelings of social justice, combined with social media and word of mouth to circulate ideas that can potentially change the world, but the troubles that these concepts might run into as others take them up and frame them for their own purposes. Furthermore, it is a window to the world of the biracial, or multicultural background child and family, where so many cultures are coming together in the one family unit and what this means in the everyday life of the children of those families.
Without giving away the ending, Asha ultimately learns how she individually might make a difference that she is in control of and has the power to shape. This book is satisfying and empowering for anyone who identifies with Asha’s background or who comes to care about her in reading the novel.
I particularly enjoyed Stevenson’s portrayal of Asha’s relationship with her grandmother and found the depiction of the internal pressure Asha feels to succeed at school from her parents, which begins to compete with the need to know and understand herself and make decisions about her own life, not just to please others, authentic. Asha’s horizons broaden with the diversity of people she meets. Asha’s struggles with her friend Carey are realistic and allow Stevenson to explore and compare safe and risky paths to growth, as well as to look at the power and pitfalls of movements.
A special feature of this book are the exhibits when Asha and her friends are on trial for their creation of the Latte Rebellion movement. These are newspaper reports, website excerpts and more. The intertexts often give an alternative viewpoint to Asha’s or fill out her descriptions so readers can gauge the need for and the impact of the Latte Rebellion club.
I highly recommend this book to any library and school wishing to encourage students to understand the complexity of diversity and the many choices we face when wanting to change the world. Young people of diverse and multiple cultural backgrounds would enjoy the character portrayals and find Asha a worthy heroine.
Our mission is to raise awareness of the ongoing need to include kids’ books that celebrate diversity in homes and school bookshelves while also working diligently to get more of these types of books into the hands of young readers, parents and educators.
Multicultural Children’s Book Day Creators
MCBD 2019 is honored to
have the following Medallion Sponsors on board!
We’d like to also give a shout-out to MCBD’s impressive CoHost Team who
not only hosts the book review link-up on celebration day, but who also works
tirelessly to spread the word of this event. View our CoHosts HERE.
TWITTER PARTY Sponsored by Make A Way Media: MCBD’s
super-popular (and crazy-fun) annual @McChildsBookDay Twitter Party will be
held 1/25/19 at 9:00pm.E.S.T. TONS of prizes and book bundles will be given
away during the party ( a prize every 5 minutes!). GO HERE for
more details.
RainyReviews is aimed at writing Self-published and Wattpad book reviews. I will be writing my own poetry and short stories. I will also be creating aesthetics.
