Sitti's Secrets (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

Nye, Naomi Shihab

ISBN 10: 061305878X ISBN 13: 9780613058780

Publisher: Turtleback, 1997

Synopsis

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. A young girl describes a visit to see her grandmother in a Palestinian village on the West Bank.

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Carpenter is the prolific illustrator of Apples to Oregon, which was an ALA Best Book of the Year and on numerous state awards lists, Fannie in the Kitchen, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Publishers Weekly called her illustrations for Queen Victoria’s Bathing Machine “sublime” in a starred review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From Booklist

Ages 4-8. Sitti means grandmother in Arabic, and in this lyrical picture book an American child misses her grandmother who lives in a Palestinian village "on the other side of the earth." The child remembers when she visited Sitti. They didn't speak the same language: at first they talked through her father, who spoke both English and Arabic, and then they invented their own language with signs and hums and claps. She remembers the house and the countryside, the culture and the clothes, and the intimacy of brushing Sitti's hair. She also remembers the painful leave-taking ("Even my father kept blowing his nose and walking outside"), and back in the U.S., she writes a letter to the President: "If the people of the United States could meet Sitti, they'd like her, for sure." Carpenter's paintings show the physical bond between child and grandmother when they're close and their imaginary connection when they're far away from each other. Like the human embrace, the pictures flow with soft curving lines of clothes and hills, birds and sky, all part of the circle of the rolling earth. There are too few books like this one about Arabs and Arab Americans as people. Nye edited the powerful global poetry collection for older readers, This Same Sky (1992); that title applies here, too, showing that "people are far apart, but connected." Every child who longs for a distant grandparent will recognize the feeling. Hazel Rochman

Edition details

• Publisher: Turtleback
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 061305878X
• ISBN 13: 9780613058780
• Binding: School & Library Binding
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Carpenter Nancy