Category: Children’s Nonfiction Review

The Witness Blanket

Truth, Art and Reconciliation

by Carey Newman
and Kirstie Hudson

Orca Books, Canada, 2022. 92 pages.
Review written January 31, 2023, from a library book
Starred Review

The Witness Blanket is a powerful book about a stunning and beautiful, but hard-hitting work of art. The Witness Blanket itself isn’t what I think of as a blanket — but it’s a sort of solid patchwork quilt, with panels fastened together so that the exhibit can travel.

The Witness Blanket was assembled from thousands of objects, photographs and letters that all bear witness to Indigenous people’s experiences in the residential schools of Canada, which operated from the mid-1800s to the late 1990s.

Author Carey Newman tells about how he is an intergenerational survivor, with trauma passed down from his father.

My father was born in 1937 in the remote town of Alert Bay, British Columbia. At age seven he was taken from his parents and sent to a residential school far away from home. Residential schools were started by the Canadian government and run by churches. The goal was to erase Indigenous cultures by making children like my father think, speak and behave less like their own people and more like European settlers. At residential school my father wasn’t allowed to speak Kwak’wala, the language of his people. He couldn’t learn about their traditional ways of living or cultural ceremonies. School authorities wouldn’t even let him talk with his siblings. Losing these experiences hurt his connection to family and culture. It also changed how he thought of himself and altered who he grew up to be.

The idea Carey Newman got for making the Witness Blanket came from the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, who were looking for a way to document and commemorate the experiences of Survivors of the residential schools.

This book takes a gentle approach to documenting those experiences as well, gently showing the reader different objects that people sent in to include in the blanket and explaining their stories — thus casting light on the experiences of many people. It also tells of the thought and care that went into putting the pieces together into the finished exhibit.

All along the way, we get detailed photos and explanations of individual pieces that went into the Witness Blanket. This makes it all the more moving to see the full-spread photographs of the completed project at the back.

I was surprised by how much this book affected me. Some day I would like to see this work of art and testimony in person. But in the meantime, I highly recommend this book.

humanrights.ca
orcabook.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/witness_blanket.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Tweet

What did you think of this book?

Before Music

Where Instruments Come From

by Annette Bay Pimentel
illustrated by Madison Safer

Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2022. 88 pages.
Review written September 7, 2022, from a library book
Starred Review

I was not at all prepared for how charmed I would be by this book. Before the title page, pictures filling up oversize pages show you a boy with a drum and a woman with a stringed instrument making music. There’s a bit of text:

Music doesn’t come out of nothing.
It always starts somewhere. . .
with something. . .
with someone.

I expected to learn about the instruments of the western orchestra. But instead, the first instrument presented is a rock gong, and the next one a pututu, made from a seashell. Yes, instruments from western orchestras are included, but they’re a relatively small part of the many, many ways that humans make music.

At the back of the book, the author explains that different cultures classify musical instruments in different ways. “In writing this book, I was inspired by the ancient Chinese system, which focused on the materials instruments are made of.” Each group of instruments is presented first with a large painting and pictures of someone making an instrument of that type. Next, the book explains how that material makes music, then we see many more instruments made with that material, subdivided using the Indian and Javanese focus on how they are played.

And there are so many kinds of instruments! Leafing through the 88 pages, I see instruments made from rock, found objects, clay, gourds, strings, metal, wood, reeds, flexible sheets, and human voices. Mixed between the descriptions of instruments and how they are made are features of musical innovators, people who figured out how to make new sounds from materials already used for instruments or how to improve what was being used.

As an example of the amazing variety found here, on the gourd instruments page, I see thirteen instruments from countries all over the world, only two of which I’d ever heard of before.

This book is fascinating and beautiful. There are suggestions at the back for kids to make their own musical instruments.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/before_music.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Tweet

What did you think of this book?