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Summary
Summary
The winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, from Newbery Medalist Cynthia Kadohata. There is bad luck, good luck, and making your own luck--which is exactly what Summer must do to save her family.
Summer knows that kouun means "good luck" in Japanese, and this year her family has none of it. Just when she thinks nothing else can possibly go wrong, an emergency whisks her parents away to Japan--right before harvest season. Summer and her little brother, Jaz, are left in the care of their grandparents, who come out of retirement in order to harvest wheat and help pay the bills.
The thing about Obaachan and Jiichan is that they are old-fashioned and demanding, and between helping Obaachan cook for the workers, covering for her when her back pain worsens, and worrying about her lonely little brother, Summer just barely has time to notice the attentions of their boss's cute son. But notice she does, and what begins as a welcome distraction from the hard work soon turns into a mess of its own.
Having thoroughly disappointed her grandmother, Summer figures the bad luck must be finished--but then it gets worse. And when that happens, Summer has to figure out how to change it herself, even if it means further displeasing Obaachan. Because it might be the only way to save her family.
Cynthia Kadohata's ode to the breadbasket of America has received six starred reviews and was selected as a National Book Award Finalist.
Author Notes
Cynthia Kadohata was born on July 2, 1956. She is a Japanese American author of children's books. Kadohata won the Newbery Medal in 2005 for her title, Kira-Kira. She also won a PEN award in 2006 for Weedflower and in 2013 she won the U.S. National Book Award for The Thing About Luck.
Kadohata was born in Chicago, Illinois, and was a high school drop out. She attained a BA in Journalism from the University of Southern California and went on to attend graduate programs at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Horn Book Review
Twelve-year-old narrator Summer lives with her brother, parents, and grandparents in Kansas in this funny, poignant novel that will give urban and suburban readers a glimpse of contemporary rural life. Summer explains how wheat farmers hire custom harvesters (independent contractors who own farming equipment), who in turn hire people like her parents to drive the combines all over the Midwest. But ever since Summer almost died from malaria, infected by a "rogue mosquito," her family has been down on its luck. Now her parents have been summoned to Japan to care for dying elderly relatives and won't be able to go "on harvest" this year. Money is tight, so Summer's grandfather, Jiichan, comes out of retirement to drive a combine, while her grandmother, Obaachan, cooks for the work crew (with Summer as her assistant). It's a hard life, but Summer's chatty narrative and her grandparents' terse humor manage to keep things light. Obaachan complains that her frizzy-haired granddaughter looks like "Yoko Ono, 1969"; Jiichan is forever clutching at his heart in reaction to such things as Teflon pans ("invented by someone who care more about easy than about good"). Summer's first crush, her mosquito obsession, her notebook sketches -- even her descriptive details about harvesting -- add layers of interest. When a crisis hits, Summer gathers her courage and saves the situation; her exultance makes for an uplifting conclusion. She believes that when something -- like a mosquito -- almost kills you, you're bonded to it for life; readers will see this is also true for Summer's bond with Obaachan (whose harsh words mask her love) and with the backbreaking but satisfying work of harvesting. jennifer m. brabander (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-Fans of Kadohata's Kira-Kira (S & S, 2004) will welcome this similarly gentle, character-driven exploration of familial bonds, this time set in the contemporary Midwest. With their parents called away to care for relatives in Japan, 12-year-old Summer and her younger brother, Jaz, accompany their grandparents, performing the grueling work that comes with the harvest season. In her likable voice, Summer observes the varying excitement, tedium, and challenges of harvesting wheat, sprinkling her narration with casual turns of phrase such as "OMG" and "epic fail" that will endear her to readers. Strong family ties suffuse this novel with a tremendous amount of heart. Though Summer's brother has been diagnosed with a number of disorders, she prefers to think of him as simply "intense," and, like most siblings, is alternately protective of and annoyed by his idiosyncrasies. Her grandparents, comically strict Obaachan and kindly Jiichan, bring warmth and humor with their cultural and generational differences. Kadohata expertly captures the uncertainties of the tween years as Summer navigates the balance of childlike concerns with the onset of increasingly grown-up responsibilities. She ponders the fragility of life after a brush with death from malaria, experiences newfound yearnings upon becoming preoccupied with a boy, and bravely steps up to save the day when her grandfather falls ill. The book's leisurely pace and extensive information about grain harvesting require some amount of patience from readers, but their investment will be rewarded by Summer's satisfying journey to self-actualization.-Allison Tran, Mission Viejo Library, CA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sharp characterizations and descriptive details about modern farming invigorate Newbery Medalist Kadohata's (Kira-Kira) funny and warm story about the Japanese-American daughter of migrant workers. Twelve-year-old Summer's family has suffered a year of bad luck that included Summer's near-fatal contraction of malaria and her parents' departure to Japan to be with ailing relatives. In order to make ends meet, Summer's grandparents come out of retirement to work for custom harvesters, which requires them to travel throughout the Midwest. Taking time off from school to accompany them, Summer reflects on her paranoia about mosquitoes, her lonely younger brother's inability to make friends, and her annoyance at her sharp-tongued grandmother. During a time of crisis, however, Summer must set her concerns aside to rise to a challenge. Lively dialogue and a succinct narrative laced with humor effectively convey Summer's emotions, observations, and courage. Readers will relate to her uncertainties and admire both her compassion and her work ethic. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 10-14. Author's agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents. Illustrator's agent: Emily van Beek, Folio Literary Management. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It seems that if Summer's Japanese American family didn't have bad luck, they'd have no luck at all. Certainly good luck (kouun) is elusive. Consider that Summer has had malaria; her little brother, Jaz, is friendless; her parents have to fly to Japan to take care of elderly relatives; and her grandmother (Obaa-chan) and grandfather (Jii-chan) must pay the mortgage by coming out of retirement to work for a custom harvesting company. When the siblings accompany their grandparents on the harvest, Summer helps her grandmother, a cook, while Jaz is Jaz: intense, focused, and bad-tempered. At first, things go reasonably well, but then Jii-chan becomes sick, and it appears that it might be up to Summer to save the day. Will she succeed? Kadohata has written a gentle family story that is unusual in its focus on the mechanics of wheat harvesting. Readers may skim the more arcane aspects of the labor-intensive work, focusing instead on the emotionally rich and often humorous dynamics of Summer's relationship with her old-fashioned but endearing grandparents and her troubled younger brother. Another engaging novel from the Newbery Medal-winning Kadohata. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With the blogosphere already starting to buzz, and author appearances and web promotions planned, Kadohata's already sizable audience will likely increase with this title.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LIKE many first-generation hyphenated Americans, I bore a murky cultural identity throughout my childhood. The daughter of Polish-born parents displaced by World War II, I carried my heritage as both a burden and a source of pride. Encountering, later, Cynthia Kadohata's stirring novels focusing on cultural assimilation, and the beautifully understated picture books by the Asian-American writer and illustrator Allen Say, who documents the conflicting emotions of Japanese immigrants and first-generation Japanese-Americans, I recognized the bittersweet richness of this kind of split heart. Say's new book, "The Favorite Daughter," is a tale about the author and his real-life American-born daughter, Yuriko, who runs up against this same mix of pride and embarrassment about her Japanese background. The story opens with Yuriko, presumably a child of divorced parents, arriving at her father's home and requesting a baby picture of herself for school. A photograph of a blond, almond-eyed toddler wearing a kimono is found (and reproduced in the book) - and declared "perfect." The following day, however, Yuriko comes home out of sorts. The new art teacher called her "Eureka," and her classmates, who know better, adopted the mispronounced name with hilarity. (Possessing a Polish nickname that never fails to necessitate repeating, at the very least, and causes embarrassment at its worst, I ached with her.) Her good-humored father goes along with her wishes to be called by an American name, while reengaging her in Japanese traditions. In "The Favorite Daughter," Say's watercolors are more casual and sketchier than the full-bodied, precise artwork in earlier books like his 1994 Caldecott Medal winner, "Grandfather's Journey." They partner well with the gentle, playful tone of the narrative, which is almost entirely dialogue. The book offers a lighthearted look at the angst of wanting to both blend in and stand out. Even as Yuriko conjures up American names for herself, she bemoans the class assignment, an art project on the Golden Gate Bridge. "We already drew the bridge in kindergarten, Daddy," she complains. He teasingly responds: "So you want an ordinary name, but you want to do something different from everyone else in art. I like the second part a lot." A foggy trip to the bridge leads to an inspired project. The closing photo of an older, smiling, kimonoclad Yuriko, accompanied by the announcement that father and daughter later traveled happily together to Japan, is indeed smile-inducing, but wraps things up a little too quickly and neatly. In "The Thing About Luck," Cynthia Kadohata's narrator, 12-year-old Summer Miyamoto, is a second-generation Japanese-American, like Kadohata herself. Kadohata is best known for her 2005 Newbery Medal winner, "Kira-Kira," about a Japanese-American family facing prejudice in the South. Summer and her younger brother, Jaz, are accompanying their Japanese-born grandparents through several Western states as part of a wheatharvesting crew. Their grandfather, Jiichan, is a combine driver and Summer assists their grandmother, Obaachan, in cooking for the crew. It has been a year without kouun, the Japanese word for good luck, Summer explains. Jaz's only friend moved away, her grandmother's back started hurting and Summer herself suffered from malaria, which left her obsessed with mosquitoes. She keeps a notebook of her drawings of the insect, which she copies from photographs. "The Thing About Luck" is enjoyable reading: the family dynamics have warmth and humor; Summer overcomes some personal challenges; and her mental meanderings take some unusual paths. At the very least, readers will learn more than anybody probably needs to know about wheat harvesting. Unlike some of Kadohata's most memorable characters, though, Summer wears her heritage lightly. Her only real tie to Japanese culture is her grandparents, who seem comfortable with the American way of life. Their employers and coworkers appear oblivious to their ethnicity; only once does anyone make what could be construed as a bigoted remark - a farmer in Oklahoma tells Jiichan, "I never seen a Chinese wheatie before." "'Japanese,'" Summer corrects him, "extra politely. . . . I felt like I had to use my best manners with people who didn't deal with many Asians. I felt like I was representing the whole Asian race." This declaration of her ethnicity comes as a surprise in a book that otherwise avoids the issue. It's not fair, of course, to expect writers to mine the same territory continually, even if that is often exactly what readers want. But if they relegate to the background the motifs that have made their earlier work powerful, we can hope that they deliver something equally compelling in their place. Much as there is to admire in both of these books, I felt just a little as though I had been offered Saylite and Kadohata-lite. Or, as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might say, skim-milk versions of these very fine authors. Krystyna Poray Goddu is the author of "Dollmakers and Their Stories: Women Who Changed the World of Play."
Kirkus Review
Twelve-year-old Summer and her Japanese-American family work every harvest season to earn money to pay their mortgage. But this year, they face unprecedented physical and emotional challenges. It has been a particularly hard-luck year. Among other strange occurrences, Summer was bitten by a stray, diseased mosquito and nearly died of malaria, and her grandmother suffers from sudden intense spinal pain. Now her parents must go to Japan to care for elderly relatives. So Summer, her brother and their grandparents must take on the whole burden of working the harvest and coping with one emergency after another. She writes a journal chronicling the frightening and overwhelming events, including endless facts about the mosquitoes she fears, the harvest process and the farm machinery that must be conquered. As the season progresses, her relationships with her grandparents and her brother change and deepen, reflecting her growing maturity. Her grandparents' Japanese culture and perspective are treated lovingly and with gentle humor, as are her brother's eccentricities. Kadohata makes all the right choices in structure and narrative. Summer's voyage of self-discovery engages readers via her narration, her journal entries and diagrams, and even through her assigned book report of A Separate Peace. Readers who peel back the layers of obsessions and fears will find a character who is determined, compassionate and altogether delightful. (Fiction. 10-14)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Thing About Luck CHAPTER ONE Kouun is "good luck" in Japanese, and one year my family had none of it. We were cursed with bad luck. Bad luck chased us around, pointing her bony finger. We got seven flat tires in six weeks. I got malaria, one of fifteen hundred cases in the United States that year. And my grandmother's spine started causing her excruciating pain. Furthermore, random bad smells emanated from we knew not where. And my brother, Jaz, became cursed with invisibility. Nobody noticed him except us. His best friend had moved away, and he did not know a single boy to hang around with. Even our cousins looked the other way when they saw him at our annual Christmas party. They didn't even seem to be snubbing my brother; they just didn't see him. The thing about luck is that it's like a fever. You can take fever meds and lie in bed and drink chicken broth and sleep seventeen hours in a row, but basically your fever will break when it wants to break. In early April my parents got a call from Japan. Three elderly relatives were getting ready to die and wanted my parents to take care of them in their last weeks and months. There was nothing surprising about this. This was just the way our year was going. It was April 25 when my grandparents and Jaz delivered my parents to the airport to catch their plane to Japan. I stayed at home because the type of malaria I'd gotten was called "airport malaria." Airport malaria is when a rogue mosquito from, say, Africa has been inadvertently carried into the United States on a jet. This infected mosquito might bite you. I got bit in Florida last summer, and I lived in Kansas. The chances that I would get malaria from going to the airport in Kansas were remote, but I'd grown so scared of mosquitoes that sometimes I didn't even like stepping outside. It really wasn't fair--I was only twelve, and yet already I was scared of the entire outside world. During the 1940s there were thousands of malaria cases in the United States. Then in the fifties the experts thought malaria here was eradicated. But every so often, someone still caught it. Sometimes you would get your picture in the newspaper. My picture was even in Time magazine! Obaachan and Jiichan, my grandmother and grandfather on my mother's side, were both sixty-seven and lived with us in Littlefield, Kansas. "Obaachan" was more formal than "Baachan," but it was what she wanted Jaz and me to call her. When harvest season arrived in May of our horrible year, Jiichan planned to come out of retirement to work as a combine driver for a custom harvesting company called Parker Harvesting, Inc. (I'll explain about custom harvesting in a minute or two.) My grandmother would work as a cook for the same harvester, with me as her helper. We'd all worked for the Parkers before. But it was the first time my parents wouldn't be there, which meant only my grandparents would be paying the mortgage during harvest this year. I didn't quite understand what "paying the mortgage" meant, but apparently, it was a constant struggle. Another phrase that came up a lot was "paying down the principal," as in, "If we could just pay down the principal, I'd feel like we were getting somewhere." I used to think that "paying down the principal" meant they wanted to bribe the principal at one of my future schools, like they would give this principal some money, and then someday the principal would let me into high school despite my iffy grades. Anyway. As soon as my grandparents got home from dropping off my parents, changes were implemented. My mother had told Jaz, "Don't worry. You'll make a friend when you least expect it." My grandparents were more proactive. It seems Obaachan and Jiichan had a bright idea they'd been hiding from us. Obaachan made Jaz and me sit on the floor in front of the coffee table while she and Jiichan sat on the couch. "We having meeting-party," she announced regally. "We invite boys we will consider for friendship with Jaz." She turned to me. "Make list with him. I no interfere." "A list of people to invite?" I asked. My Doberman, Thunder, tried to push himself between me and the table. I pushed back, and we just sat there, leaning hard into each other. "No! A list!" she snapped at me. Wasn't that what I had just said? I finally got up and moved to a different side of the table. Still unsure what she wanted, I got a pen and paper. "Pencil! You may need to erase." I got a pencil and readied myself. "Should I number the list?" I asked. My grandfather nodded sagely. "Agenda," he said. "List for boys we invite, agenda for party." "No interfere!" Obaachan said to Jiichan. "You interfere first!" "No!" Obaachan and Jiichan had been married for forty-nine years, and my mother always said that after that number of years, you no longer had to be polite all the time. It sometimes seemed that in our house, I was the only one who had to use my manners. Jaz didn't have to because he had issues. When I'm sixty-seven, in fifty-five years, I supposed that I would finally be able to dispense with my manners. I thought Jiichan and Obaachan talked to each other the way that they did because they'd had an arranged marriage. Obaachan said that if I had an arranged marriage, I would never give or receive a broken heart. If I grew up beautiful, I would never break any man's heart, and if I grew up plain, nobody would break my heart. If I rebelled and wanted love, however, all bets were off. Broken hearts would come my way like locusts. "Summer! You in rah-rah land." She never said "la-la land," and I never corrected her. I hurriedly wrote Number one on the paper in the left-hand margin. "No number," Obaachan said. "Arrange by time. I have to tell you everything?" Jiichan picked up the paper, studied the Number one, and set the paper back down. "I agree. Arrange by time." I erased the Number one and wrote in One o'clock p.m. I made sure not to flick the eraser bits onto the floor, because if I did, Obaachan would be so upset that she might fall over dead. "Noon!" barked Obaachan. I made the change. "Continue. First write day on top of paper in big letter. Day for meeting is next Saturday. Then continue." "What would you like to do at noon?" I asked Jaz. "Play with LEGOs. I want a LEGO party." "Not really party," Jiichan said. He was cleaning his teeth with the floss he always carried in his shirt pocket. Sometimes he flossed during dinner, right at the table. See what I mean about manners? Can you imagine what your parents would do if you started to floss at the dinner table? But he constantly seemed to have something between his teeth. "More of meeting than party," he said. "Noon lunchtime," Obaachan said. "You feed boys first. Boys always hungry. Never mind. I no interfere. But no food, no friend. What I just say?" "No food, no friend," Jaz and I repeated. Obaachan sometimes made us repeat something she had just said, to prove we were listening. Jaz turned to Obaachan. "Obaachan, will you make sandwiches?" "Summer make. I her mentor." I found myself already starting to feel stressed. What if I made ham sandwiches and the boys wanted tuna fish? What if I used regular bread and one of the boys needed gluten-free, like my friend Alyssa had to eat because of her allergies? What if I used too much mayonnaise? Arghhh! Still, next to Noon I wrote Sandwich eating. Jiichan pounded on the paper. "Lunch!" he cried out passionately. "Not 'sandwich eating'! It called 'lunch'!" He clutched at his heart. "You kids go to kill me." Apparently, about once every couple of weeks, he thought we were going to kill him. "What kind of sandwiches would you like?" I asked Jaz, still worrying about those. "I don't want to make the wrong kind." "I'll ask around at school. I can't believe this is happening. I'm really going to have a meeting-party." He got up to look at himself in a mirror over our fake fireplace and said, "You are going to have a meeting-party." Jiichan was now standing and staggering away from us with his hands on his heart. Jaz and I watched him calmly. "I die, scatter ashes," Jiichan said. "No keep in hole in wall at cemetery. You hear me?" "Yes, Jiichan," we said. "Good. Then I die happy." I wrote down LEGOs, one o'clock. My brother had approximately one thousand dollars' worth of LEGOs. Seriously. I counted once. LEGOs were one of our biggest expenses and the only thing we splurged on. "Good plan!" Jiichan said. "That brilliant!" I couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic as he peered over my shoulder from his death throes. "How long is the meeting-party?" Jaz asked. "I think most parties are two hours," I answered. "So I guess that's the end of the agenda?" Nobody answered, so I made a line underneath the agenda and laid down the pencil. "Who should I invite?" Jaz asked. "Should it be just kids who I think might come, or should it be kids who might not come but on the other hand you never know? Should it be just kids in my class, or should it be all the kids in my grade? Should it be boys and girls or just boys? Should it be only kids who might not even know who I am even though I know who they are? Should it--" Jiichan held up his palm to quiet Jaz. "Invite whole fifth grade," he said wisely. We all looked at him, and he nodded. "That way hurt nobody's feelings." Jaz stared at him doubtfully for a moment, but then his face turned from doubtful to ecstatic. I could almost hear him thinking, Wow, the whole school might come to my meeting-party! Then my grandparents wanted Jaz to draw invitations. He was a good artist in kind of a weird way. Like, he never drew pictures of anything recognizable, but if you needed a totally psychedelic design, he was your man. But he wanted to buy invitations because he thought they were more official. We ended up driving thirty miles to a 99-cent store in a larger town. After loud and passionate debate, we bought several boxes of dinosaur invitations. On Monday, Jaz distributed them to all the kids in the fifth grade at his school. So as not to jinx the party, we weren't supposed to talk to one another about it. But we could pray all we wanted, in front of several sprigs of silk cherry blossoms on the coffee table. We did this the night before the party. Cherry blossoms, as the harbingers of spring, were important to Japanese farmers. My grandmother mumbled in Japanese as I knelt beside her. I could make out a word occasionally--like unmei for "destiny." As Obaachan muttered on, I prayed in my head: Please let my brother have a successful meeting-party. Let the kids have fun, let him make at least one friend, preferably two. Please, please, please. That night I drew in my notebook like I always did. I didn't draw very well, so each picture took me weeks. I copied them from photographs of mosquitoes I found. One time I thought I had a perfect drawing, so I sent it to a mosquito expert, and this is what he said: "Looks like an Anopheles, but the proboscis is 'hairy' and the palps look like a thin line, so this is not a good representation, but could easily be changed (make palps more than a line and get rid of bristle on mouthparts and you have an Anopheles female). The problem is that most (but not all) Anopheles in the U.S. tend to have spots on their wings, which these drawings lack." Wow, epic fail on my part! It was strange because I knew that if I had almost been killed by a car, I wouldn't have become fascinated with cars. If I had almost drowned, I wouldn't have become obsessed with water. But the more I looked at mosquitoes, even the same type that had infected me, the more delicate they seemed. Fragile, even. And yet one had almost taken my life. It was like now we couldn't be separated. I mean, if I saw one on my arm, I wouldn't hesitate to smash it or even run screaming down the highway. They terrified me. But still, we were inseparable. Excerpted from The Thing about Luck by Cynthia Kadohata All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
