Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | EASY LIN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | EASY LIN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | EASY LIN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | EASY LIN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Beautifully illustrated by Jessica Lanan, The Story I'll Tell is a gentle and moving story of adoption and parental love, taking the form of answers to a young child's question to his mother: Where did I come from?' Each lyrical and fantastic origin tale contains a kernel of truth that pieces together the baby's journey across a wide ocean into his new mother's arms. This picturebook is sure to touch the hearts of readers everywhere, no matter how they came to be part of their family.'
Author Notes
Nancy Tupper Ling
Is the winner of the Writer's Digest Grand Prize and the Pat Parnell Poetry Award, and is the founder of Fine Line Poets, a website for poets who live in New England. She was inspired to write The Story I'll Tell by the multicultural background of her own family and the experiences of friends who have adopted children from all over the world. Ling resides in Walpole, Massachusetts, with her husband and their two young daughters.
Jessica Lanan
Has been in love with illustrated books since an early age. A Colorado native, she received her B.A. at Scripps College and has traveled extensively in Asia and Europe. She currently lives in Boulder, Colorado, where she enjoys thunderstorms, crunching autumn leaves beneath her feet, and leaving footprints in freshly fallen snow.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Titles like I Love You Like Crazy Cakes (2000) have given adoptive parents ways to tell their children how they reached their new families. Ling (My Sister, Alicia May) imagines what she would say if she could convey the excitement of her child's adoption through fantasy: "I might tell how you came from a land far away in a hot-air balloon." Lanan (Good Fortune in a Wrapping Cloth) paints the arriving baby nestled in the basket of a red balloon that floats over a bed of tiger lilies as the new parents look up from their garden, startled. The mother imagines a series of stories-that her child has been delivered on horseback, by a winged angel, and more: " `Not true!' you'll say when I tell these tales. And I'll smile, because it will be hard to fool the brightest child in the world." Laced with Chinese-flavored splendor throughout, Lanan's spreads match Ling's romance with pools of moonlight, banks of clouds, and ghosts of zodiac figures. It's an unabashed love letter, one that many families will treasure. Ages 5-9. Author's agent: Ammi-Joan Paquette, Erin Murphy Literary Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
A narrating mother "might" tell her adopted son one of several fantastical adoption stories (e.g., he "came from a land far away in a hot-air balloon"). Readers who want real answers about adoption may be frustrated until a two-page spread finally explains that an airplane brought the boy home. The watercolor and colored-pencil art strains for lyricism and sometimes succeeds. (c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Love for an adoptive child guides fanciful musings about his origins. A mother snuggles her child and reads him a book while italicized text suggests her thoughts: "Someday when you ask where you came from, I'll tell you a story." Ensuing double-page spreads present clever, fantastic scenarios of a baby arriving in a hot air balloon's basket, in a horseman's satchel, and in the arms of an angel, among other visions. Some scenes use geographic or cultural markers to suggest specific heritagea reference to "the mountains of Yunnan" suggests that the child was born in China. While text avoids gendered pronouns and nouns, artistic markers such as blue pajamas and short, cropped hair hint that the child is a boy, which is notable since the vast majority of Chinese children placed for adoption are girls. A heartwarming conclusion ties the mother's fanciful stories to the parents' real flight through the sky with their new baby and acknowledges that "the truth is a beautiful story too." But, despite a line about how the baby "cried for things lost and new," nowhere in this beautiful truth is there room for overt acknowledgement of birthparents, which is a shame, given the loving depiction of the multigenerational adoptive family that concludes the book. An incomplete, if lovingly told, adoption story. (Picture book. 4-7) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In Ling's latest picture book, a mother anticipates a time when her adopted child will ask how they found each other. But instead of giving a straightforward explanation of the adoption process, Mom playfully tells a series of loving tall tales. Lanan's fanciful watercolor and colored-pencil illustrations match and enhance the tone of these stories. They feature the mother's enchanting journeys and her child's various, increasingly more magical arrivals: floating in on a hot-air balloon, being carried in the satchel of a medieval-era horseman, or nestled in a basket that's floating to shore on a wave. Each double-page spread features at least one warm, glowing light, and these sweet stories and warm lights aptly convey the love that mothers and fathers, birth or adopted, have for their children. Though there are plenty of picture books for new children, adoption stories are somewhat less common than birth stories, and this is a particularly well-done example of an adoption fairy tale that is sure to be a comforting resource to parents and children alike. And when the narrator comes to the true account of how this mother adopted her son she traveled on a plane and gathered him in a silk blanket and flew on wings through the sky it seems just as magical as the other stories.--Nolan, Abby Copyright 2016 Booklist
