The Year of the Dog

The Year of the Dog by Grace Lin

If you’re looking for a chapter book about Chinese New Year, you couldn’t do any better than this.  Grace Lin draws from her own childhood experience to write a sweet tale of friendship, family and cultural identity.  The book opens with the family preparing for the Year of the Dog.  Pacy’s older sister and mother tell her that the Year of the Dog is a special year for making friends, but that it’s also a year for finding out about yourself.  Over the course of the year, Pacy makes a new best friend, struggles with whether she is Chinese, Taiwanese or American  and learns that she has  special talent for writing and illustrating.

The book lightly touches on racism, from the school lunch ladies confusing Pacy with the only other Asian girl at school, to girls at a Taiwanese camp telling her that she’s a Twinkie “yellow on the outside, white on the inside” because she doesn’t speak Taiwanese or Chinese, to Pacy feeling excluded from plays because there are never parts for Chinese people.  The way these situations are presented really make the reader see things from Pacy’s perspective, even if these are issues they’ve never really pondered before.

My only warning: the descriptions of the meals throughout the book are particularly tantalizing, so you may find yourself desperately needing a Chinese food fix after reading.

Great For: This has all of the old-fashioned charm of a series like Betsy-Tacy, but is modern, so it will appeal to fans of realistic fiction as well as children (and families) that are looking for cultural diversity or a good, clean, family story.  It was a huge hit with my third graders, boys and girls alike.

Sex, Nudity, Dating – The girls have crushes on boys.  They pretend that they will marry them.  A boy and a girl hold hands.
Profanity – None.
Death, Violence and Gore – Grandpa is a doctor and sees a patient who is bleeding a lot due to injury.  Lissy tells Pacy that when she was little she got really sick and had a tube in her ankle.  Dorothy kills the witch in the Wizard of Oz (I know, that was a bit of a spoiler…)  Chinese foot-binding is briefly referenced.  A boy writes a book about a knight who killed people.  There is a story with a ghost, but it is not scary or violent.
Drugs, Alcohol and Smoking – In search of candy, the kids eat more than the recommended number of gummy vitamins.
Frightening or Intense Things – None.