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Summary
Summary
New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Collins has created a deeply moving autobiographical picture book about a father who must go off to the war in Vietnam -- and the daughter who stays behind.When young Suzy's father leaves for Vietnam, she struggles to understand what this means for her and her family. What is the jungle like? Will her father be safe? When will he return? The months slip by, marked by the passing of the familiar holidays and the postcards that her father sends. With each one, he feels more and more distant, until Suzy isn't sure she'd even recognize her father anymore.This heartfelt and accessible picture book by Suzanne Collins, the New York Times bestselling author of the Hunger Games series, is accompanied by James Proimos's sweet and charming illustrations. This picture book will speak to any child who has had to spend time away from a parent.
Author Notes
Suzanne Collins was born on August 10, 1962. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut and graduated from Indiana University with a double major in Drama and Telecommunications. Collins went on to receive an M.F.A. from New York University in dramatic writing. Since 1991, she has been a writer for children's television shows. She has worked on the staffs of several shows including Clarissa Explains it All, The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo, Little Bear and Oswald. She also co-wrote the Rankin/Bass Christmas special, Santa, Baby! and was the head writer for Scholastic Entertainment's Clifford's Puppy Days. Her books include When Charlie McButton Lost Power, The Underland Chronicles, and the Hunger Games Trilogy. Book one of this trilogy, The Hunger Games, became a major motion picture in 2012 with Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence portraying the main character of Katniss Everdeen. Catching Fire, book 2 of the trilogy, became a major motion picture in 2013. Mockingjay - Part One was released as a film in 2014 and Part Two in 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her first picture book, Collins sensitively examines the impact of war on the very young, using her own family history as a template. Suzy is the youngest of four children-Proimos draws her with impossibly big, questioning blue eyes and a mass of frizzy red hair-and she is struggling to understand the changes in her family. "My dad has to go to something called a war," she explains. "It's in a place called Viet Nam. Where is Viet Nam? He will be gone a year. How long is a year? I don't know what anybody's talking about." When Suzy learns that her father is in the jungle, she imagines something akin to the setting of her favorite cartoon (Collins suggests it's George of the Jungle). As the months wear on, though, Suzy begins to piece together the danger her father is in, whether it's through the increasingly unnerving postcards he sends (one reads, "Pray for me," in closing) or by catching a snippet of wartime violence on the news. "Explosions. Helicopters. Guns. Soldiers lie on the ground. Some of them aren't moving." In four wordless spreads, Proimos makes Suzy's awakening powerfully clear, as the gray jungle she initially pictured (populated by four smiling, brightly colored animals) gives way to a more violent vision, as the animals morph into weapons of war. Just when Suzy's confusion and fear reach an apex: "Then suddenly my dad's home." As in Collins's Hunger Games books, the fuzzy relationship between fear and bravery, and the reality of combat versus an imagined (or, in the case of those books, manufactured) version of it is at the forefront of this story. By the final pages, Suzy has come to understand that "Some things have changed but some things will always be the same." It's a deceptively simple message of reassurance that readers who may currently be in Suzy's situation can take to heart, whether their loved ones return changed, as hers did, or don't return at all. Ages 4-up. Agent: Rosemary Stimola, Stimola Literary Studio. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Collins tells a story based on her own childhood, the year her father was deployed in Vietnam and she began first grade. The narrator's limited point of view is what allows a complex story to work as a picture book for young children: "My dad has to go to something called a war...He will be gone a year. How long is a year? I don't know what anybody's talking about." Suzy does know that her dad is in the jungle, so she fills in that gap with happy images from her favorite cartoon. As the year goes on, her sheltered understanding is eroded by grown-ups who act worried when she tells them where her father is, by some confusing messages on the postcards her dad sends, by a sudden absence of those postcards, and finally by frightening images she sees on TV ("Explosions. Helicopters. Guns. Soldiers lie on the ground. Some of them aren't moving"). Throughout the book, scenes of Suzy's everyday life (getting a new lunchbox, tracing her hand to make Thanksgiving turkeys, playing with her cat) alternate with wordless spreads from Suzy's imagination, as her benign picture of the Vietnam jungle begins to morph into something much more dark, dangerous, and realistic. At the end of the book, Suzy's dad has returned home "different"--tired, thin, and prone to staring into space--and Suzy has changed, too, able to talk with her dad about that year and to live with the changes it has wrought. An understated, extremely effective home-front story. martha v. parravano (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Collins mines her own experience to tell a tender personal story of war seen through a child's eyes. First-grader Suzy's father is deployed to Vietnam. At first, though she misses him, she dreams of the exotic jungle. But as the year goes on, marked by Christmas trees and candy hearts, things get harder. His postcards arrive less and less frequently, while news of the war, and its real dangers, comes more and more often. In the end, Suzy's father returns, and while some things are different, some things are the same. Collins' unflinching first-person account details the fears and disappointments of the situation as a child would experience them. And where more realistic illustrations would feel overwrought and sentimental, Proimos' flat, cartoony drawings, with their heavy lines and blocky shapes, are sturdy and sweet, reflecting a child's clear-eyed innocence. While small personal details and specific references to Vietnam fix the story in one child's individual experience, it is these very particularities that establish the kind of indelible and heartfelt resonance that is universally understood. Indeed, children missing parents in all kinds of circumstances will find comfort here. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Heard of a little series called The Hunger Games? Yes, well, this is by the very same author.--Barthelmess, Thom Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SUZANNE COLLINS, author of the famously bloody "Hunger Games" trilogy, has written a picture-book memoir about what life at home is like for a child whose father has gone away to war. Collins's own father went to Vietnam the year she turned 6, and she's said the experience had a profound effect on him. But though posttraumatic stress disorder is often spoken of these days, the more subtle effects of war on the children of men and women serving abroad are less well known. "Year of the Jungle" is narrated by a little red-haired girl named Sue, whose father reads her poems by Ogden Nash. Her favorite is about a dragon named Custard that "keeps crying for a nice safe cage." Sue thinks that while Custard "always feels afraid, he is really the bravest of all. And that's what makes him special." When her father leaves for Vietnam, Sue must follow Custard's example. The year "goes on and on." Sue waits. She measures the passing of time by the arrival of a turkey, a Christmas tree, shamrocks and colored eggs. There is a postcard with a picture of Saigon, then one with a picture of a Vietnamese fisherman. The children watch their mother, worried she might be "going to the jungle, too," but she stays. Sue's initial impression of the jungle is positive. Her "favorite cartoon character lives in a jungle," and she thinks she'd like to go to Vietnam to find her father. She will fly there. "You can fly anywhere in your dreams." But over the course of the year, the dream begins to darken. The postcards stop coming. Then Sue's father sends her a birthday card when it isn't her birthday, and she begins to realize that "the jungle must be a very confusing place" for her father to have made "such a serious mistake." One day, she watches graphic footage of the war on television, and her mother rushes in to turn off the set. Sue is afraid, but she doesn't have the language to describe her fear. She hides in the closet to cry alone. While Sue is not able to formulate her feelings in words, James Proimos's excellent illustrations capture her confusion. In one image, Sue imagines the landscape of Vietnam as a place with green elephants shooting white blobby monsters from their trunks and yellow goblins rising from coffee cups, while a rhino-shaped helicopter floats overhead. This visual nightmare mirrors a child's skewed perception of war so well that it is clear Sue is going through her own version of hell. At the end of the year, Sue's father returns, "tired and thin," his skin "the color of pancake syrup." He "stares into space. He is here but not here." "Some things have changed," Sue reflects, "but some things will always be the same." In other words, bad things happen, but life goes on. "Year of the Jungle" may take place in the late 1960s, but with more than 2.3 million Americans deployed abroad between 2001 and 2012, the mixture of anxiety, excitement, fear, boredom and confusion Sue experiences on the home front will be sadly familiar to many children. For them, Collins's picture book may be a good tool to discuss the complex feelings war brings into a household. Children are sure to ask why Sue's father went away, and why he was different when he returned. Maybe some frank discussions about war, ones that involve more than stories about courageous dragons, will help children better understand what military service entails. "Year of the Jungle" brings up big questions. Parents will need to provide the answers. DANIELLE TRUSSONI is the author of the memoir "Falling Through the Earth" and of two novels, most recently "Angelopolis." A new memoir, "The Fortress," will appear next year.
School Library Journal Review
K Up-Collins's first picture book vividly portrays the impact of war on children. Young Suzy learns that her dad "has to go to something called a war...in a place called Viet Nam." As time passes, she begins to understand the danger her father faces. Proimos's simple stylized illustrations, depicting Suzy with oversize eyes, accentuate a child's viewpoint. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
First-grader Suzy's father is in the jungles of Vietnam for a year. Through a tightly controlled child's point of view, readers live the year with little Suzy in the sheltered world her parents have built for her. She understands little at first, imagining romps in the jungle with elephants and apes. Her father sends her postcards every so often with cheery scenes of the tropics. Eventually, the postcards stop coming. She misses her dad, especially when her brother takes over some of her father's duties, like reading the comics or Ogden Nash's poems to her. One day, the wall of protection is broken by the television, with frightening visions of explosions, helicopters, guns and dead soldiers. Her mother whisks her away, too late. Proimos' ink-and-digital art, in his signature cartoon style, adds needed humor to a frankly scary story that honors Suzy's experience and respects those who share it. Occasional full-page wordless spreads allow readers to see into Suzy's mind, beginning with her flying through the jungle and leading up to her post-epiphany anxiety about tanks and helicopters and rifles. With a notable lack of patriotic rhetoric or clichs about bravery and honor, Collins holds firm to her childhood memories, creating a universal story for any child whose life is disrupted by war. Important and necessary. (Picture book. 4-10)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
