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A review by afterglobe
In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord
4.0
4/5
I first read this book as a Russian immigrant to the United States. I was in fourth grade and this was required reading. I dreaded this book, because I knew little about reading in English and even less about baseball.
The first time I read this book, I was unimpressed. I was living my own experience of stumbling over foreign characters and words, of going up to children on playgrounds and being told to go away upon asking if I could play with them. I missed Russia fiercely - it was physically painful to think about birch trees dozing under sheets of winter snow, about the summer sun which hovered above the balmy waters of the Oka river and only dipped for an hour or two long after midnight... I missed singing old war songs with my grandmother and feeling like a princess with my hair up in bows.
I'm now twenty eight and am a dual citizen of these two amazing countries. I picked up this book out of nostalgia. This second reading struck me, because there were so many similarities in Shirley's experience and my own. I understood her longing for home on a visceral level. I understood the hollow craving for acceptance. I understood the hope for a new beginning - my own little brother was born in America. Shirley's experience was so intimately linked to my own, despite our different origins and even the difference in the places where we ended up.
Parts of this book did not age well (which is why the rating isn't higher) but overall the message is relevant even now. I recognized so many of Shirley's experiences within my own. The book is written in honest, simple, beautiful prose and reveals a world that is at once wholesome and challenging. It's an important story, one made all the more relevant by the simple fact that it continues to be repeated by immigrants over and over again.
I first read this book as a Russian immigrant to the United States. I was in fourth grade and this was required reading. I dreaded this book, because I knew little about reading in English and even less about baseball.
The first time I read this book, I was unimpressed. I was living my own experience of stumbling over foreign characters and words, of going up to children on playgrounds and being told to go away upon asking if I could play with them. I missed Russia fiercely - it was physically painful to think about birch trees dozing under sheets of winter snow, about the summer sun which hovered above the balmy waters of the Oka river and only dipped for an hour or two long after midnight... I missed singing old war songs with my grandmother and feeling like a princess with my hair up in bows.
I'm now twenty eight and am a dual citizen of these two amazing countries. I picked up this book out of nostalgia. This second reading struck me, because there were so many similarities in Shirley's experience and my own. I understood her longing for home on a visceral level. I understood the hollow craving for acceptance. I understood the hope for a new beginning - my own little brother was born in America. Shirley's experience was so intimately linked to my own, despite our different origins and even the difference in the places where we ended up.
Parts of this book did not age well (which is why the rating isn't higher) but overall the message is relevant even now. I recognized so many of Shirley's experiences within my own. The book is written in honest, simple, beautiful prose and reveals a world that is at once wholesome and challenging. It's an important story, one made all the more relevant by the simple fact that it continues to be repeated by immigrants over and over again.