May 21 2015

Book Review: Max Loves Muñecas! by Zetta Elliott

Reviewed by Ashley Hope Pérez

PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION: Max wants to visit a beautiful boutique that sells handmade dolls, but he worries that other children will tease him. When he finally finds the courage to enter the store, Max meets Señor Pepe who has been making dolls since he was a boy in Honduras. Señor Pepe shares his story with Max and reminds him that, “There is no shame in making something beautiful with your hands. Sewing is a skill—just like hitting a baseball or fixing a car.”

MY TWO CENTS: Max Loves Muñecas interweaves a number of topics: resisting the constraints of traditional gender roles, child homelessness, resourcefulness and resilience, and the value of cooperation and generosity. In the hands of a lesser writer, these many focal points might overpower a slim chapter book of 72 pages, but Zetta Elliott creates a richly textured narrative world and situations that give readers opportunities to pause, consider their own lives, and reflect on the power of individual choices.

The first and last chapters of the book focus on Max, a young American boy intrigued by the intricacy and beauty of the dolls in a neighborhood shop run by Señor Pepe. Despite his interest, Max fears teasing by his classmates; in fact, the book’s title comes from the teasing he endures. By the end of this book, however, Zetta Elliott turns “Max loves muñecas!” from a taunt into an affirmation as Señor Pepe invites Max to work as his apprentice. Although “Max loves muñecas!” powerfully captures a key shift in the book, it is somewhat misleading as a title because Max’s story serves primarily as a frame for Señor Pepe’s telling of his own experiences as a young boy in Honduras, which are the focus of the eight central chapters of the book.

We first learn of Pepe’s life as a poor but happy boy living with a loving grandmother who earns money by cleaning a wealthy family’s home and selling rag dolls to tourists. When Pepe’s grandmother passes away, neighbors make arrangements and send a telegram, but no one comes to get him. After three days, the landlord sends him away. With nothing but a blanket, his grandmother’s sewing basket, and a handful of coins, Pepe strikes out on his own.

He briefly joins a band of street boys living under an overpass where each has a special skill he contributes to the group, but he remembers his grandmother’s admonitions: “You are not a street boy. You do not drift from place to place like a weed in the sea” (15). After a night on the streets, Pepe stops to help an elderly woman struggling to open the shutters to her doll shop. So begins his relationship with Señora Beatriz, who cautiously invites him into her shop, intrigued by his delight at the beauty of her dolls and impressed with his good manners and facility with simple sewing tasks. Pepe finds a place in her heart—and her home—and continues to develop his love for making beautiful things.

But of course there are bumps along the way, a number of which center on the difficulty of bala MaxLovesMunecasImage2 ncing good intentions and generosity to others with responsibility and a concern for appearances. When Señora Beatriz sends Pepe out for lunch on their first day together, Melky, one of the street boys, recognizes him and runs over to join him. Pepe becomes preoccupied with Melky’s disheveled appearance, worrying that the señora might think he is a street boy, too, if she sees him with Melky. Pepe understands the boy’s hungry glances at the lunch bag, but his fear over damaging his opportunity with Señora Beatriz is what drives him to share his food: “If I give you some of my lunch, you have to promise to go away. You can’t let the señora see you—ever!” (33).

Later, when the señora goes out of town for the night, Pepe’s desire to surprise her leads him to attempt to finish a wedding dress using her cantankerous sewing machine. When it jams, his efforts to fix it result in a broken piece. Fearing a return to the streets if the señora discovers his disobedience and damage of the machine, he searches out Primo, the leader of the street boys, who is also an expert tinkerer. Primo can’t repair the broken piece without seeing the whole machine, and a new round of dilemmas opens up for Pepe as Melky and Primo follow him back to the señora’s house. He knows the señora would not want strangers in her house and worries that the street boys might get up to mischief, but he can’t see any way out of his problem without help. Far from wanting to steal from the señora, Primo and Melky fall in l MaxLovesMunecasImage3 ove with the beautiful fabrics and deck themselves out in tiaras and veils. Primo succeeds at fixing the sewing machine, but the boys are so tired from their efforts they fall asleep at the kitchen table.

Once Señora Beatriz’s initial displeasure wears off, she is impressed by Primo’s technical abilities, charmed by young Melky, and pleased with the initiative and cooperation of all three boys. Ultimately, although only little Melky goes to school, all three boys gain the chance for a better life through their work for Señora Beatriz.

TEACHING TIPS: Max Loves Muñecas! is a good choice for upper elementary readers to explore on their own, and it would make an excellent read-aloud text (one chapter per session) for students across the elementary grades. The story highlights the boys’ spontaneous interest in dolls and fine fabrics, and it shows how following one’s passions can open doors. Max Loves Muñecas! also creates openings for students to discuss differences regarding schooling and child poverty in different communities and at different times. Finally, the book offers a number of scenarios where the “right” choice is relatively ambiguous, and these scenarios are ripe for exploration in conversation, journaling, drawing, or reenactment.

Although the handful of simple illustrations scattered through the book help provide a visual reference point for Pepe and Max’s adventures, there is still plenty of room for imagining and recreating scenes from the story. Students may especially benefit from guided exercises to help them imagine perspectives and experiences different from their own. Start with questions like, “What do you think Melky feels when Pepe makes him promise to never come to the señora’s shop?” or “Why is the señora disappointed when she first returns from her trip?” but take time exploring the other perspectives involved in a given moment in the narrative. When supported, even young children can stretch their capacity for empathy and perspective-taking beyond identifying with the protagonist.

Zetta Elliott is the award-winning author of stories for children, YA novels, and poetry, plays, and essays for adults. Born and raised in Canada, she has lived in the US for 20 years and earned a PhD in American Studies from NYU in 2003. Her picture book, Bird, won the Honor Award in Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Contest and the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers. Her latest YA novel, The Deep, was published in November 2013. She is an advocate for greater diversity and equity in publishing, and to this end she has published several illustrated books for younger readers—including Max Loves Muñecas—under her own imprint, Rosetta Press. She currently lives in Brooklyn. Visit her online at www.zettaelliott.com

Mauricio J. Flores was born in 1988 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where he currently resides. Trained as an architect, he has worked extensively as a freelance illustrator and web designer. When he’s not drawing, he enjoys listening to a vast spectrum of music genres, studying languages, and reading epic fantasy novels and comics. Visit him at http://mjflores.visioncomicshn.com/.

Jun 12 2014

Guest Post: Self-Publishing Often the Only Recourse for Writers of Color

By Zetta Elliott

“I am an immigrant.” When I visit schools, I always start my presentation with these words. Next, I ask the students to guess my country of origin. Their answers are often predictable and sometimes surprising: the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico—Italy! When I tell them that I don’t speak Spanish but I do speak a little French, they call out a different list of countries until someone gets it right: Canada.

I open with my immigrant status in part because I once had a Latina approach me at the end of a presentation in Brooklyn and say, “I hate that word.” I didn’t ask about her status, but it was clear that she felt there was something shameful about being an immigrant. So I announce my own status with pride and use my presentation to demonstrate how my early years in Canada helped to shape the writer I became after I migrated to the US twenty years ago.

Immigration is a charged issue here, and though Canadians aren’t generally mentioned in the national debate, there’s still a pretty good chance I could run into trouble in Arizona. As a mixed-race woman of African descent, I often get read as Latina. Here, in New York City, I walk with my driver’s license, my passport, and my green card at all times because my Afro-Caribbean father taught me that some protections are reserved for citizens only (and only those citizens who aren’t brown like me). My father also urged me not to get involved in social justice movements, but I chose to disregard that advice.

I’m a black feminist—or what my father would call “a troublemaker.” I began to write for children over a decade ago because I couldn’t find culturally relevant material to use with my black students. I came to the US to attend graduate school, and there I developed a deeper understanding of intersectionality and invisibility. The title of one black feminist anthology encapsulates this perfectly: All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Black women too often find themselves erased from discussions of racism and sexism, and when it comes to children’s literature, it can be just as easy for Afro-Latin@ kids to fall through the cracks.

Published by Skyscape, 2010

In 2000, I started a book club for the girls in my building. They were all black and we had been meeting for weeks before I realized that half the girls in the group were Panamanian. When they were with me, they spoke the black vernacular of their African American peers, but at home they spoke Spanish. When I wrote my YA time-travel novel A Wish After Midnight, I decided to give my protagonist a hybrid identity—Genna Colon’s mother is African American but her father is an Afro-Panamanian immigrant. When her father leaves the family to return to Panama, Genna yearns for a connection to her Latino heritage, but her jaded mother insists that race trumps ethnicity: “in America, it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what language you speak. Black is black and you might as well get used to it.”

Such a simplistic understanding of race is not uncommon, but many scholars, activists, and artists advocate for an appreciation of multiplicity—recognizing and respecting the specificity of blackness instead of reducing it to a single generic identity. As a black feminist writer, one of my goals is to counter the marginalization of black children in literature by writing stories about kids who are silenced and/or rendered invisible. I try to avoid the all too familiar “types” that seem to show up over and over again. Hakeem Diallo is a gifted basketball player but he’s also Muslim, biracial (black and South Asian), and he dreams of becoming a chef one day. Dmitri is a bird-watching math whiz who loses his mother to cancer and so lives with his elderly white foster mother. Judah is a Rastafarian teen from Jamaica who dreams of moving to Africa.

Self-published through CreateSpace under Rosetta Press

In 2009, I went to see the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novella Coraline. I had some issues with the representation of women in the film, and went home thinking of a way to write a story about black boys and dolls. The end result was Max Loves Muñecas!—one of four chapter books that I self-published in May. The story follows three homeless boys in 1950s Honduras who are taken in by a kind woman who makes dolls. I was inspired by my father’s childhood in the Caribbean. He was raised by his grandmother on the island of Nevis, and with no money to spare, my father learned to make his own toys out of recycled materials. They were poor but my great-grandmother made sure my father was always presentable and well behaved. Respectability meant a lot since the family had so little.

I knew I wanted my story to take place within the Caribbean basin, but I had limited knowledge of Latin America. I chose Honduras for the setting of Max Loves Muñecas! because the best doll maker I know is Afro-Honduran designer Cozbi Cabrera. Also my community college student Saira, a Garífuna woman, gave a presentation in class about the murder rate in Honduras—the highest in the world. This is due, in part, to street violence fueled by gang members who have been deported from the US. My story isn’t set in contemporary Honduras, but the book does challenge gender norms and exposes the tender, creative side so many boys are forced to conceal.

I often write about boys because I have seen firsthand how expressive, sensitive boys shut down as they mature and assume the hard, unfeeling posture of a young “thug.” Boys around the world are socialized in a way that leaves them unable to reveal their authentic selves and the consequences can be devastating—especially for girls, but for boys and men as well. As a feminist I realize that if I want to end violence against women and girls, I have to start paying more attention to boys.

These issues mean a lot to me, but social justice is not generally a priority for the children’s publishing industry. For the past five years I have written essays and given talks about the glaring inequality within publishing, and the issue has garnered more attention recently thanks to the social media campaign #WeNeedDiverseBooks. Several editors rejected Max Loves Muñecas! (the last one wrote, “Zetta is such a lovely writer and I did enjoy this story – but I just don’t think we can find a big enough market for it”) and so the story sat on my hard drive for five years until I finally decided to self-publish it. I found a Honduran illustrator, Mauricio J. Flores, on Elance; he completed ten black and white illustrations and I used the print-on-demand site CreateSpace to publish the book.

The biggest challenge with self-publishing is finding a way to connect your books with readers. The Brown Bookshelf recently ran a series called “Making Our Own Market,” and I contributed a guest post in which I shared my core objectives:

To generate culturally relevant stories that center children who have been marginalized, misrepresented, and/or rendered invisible in children’s literature.
To produce affordable, high-quality books so that families—regardless of income—can build home libraries that will enhance their children’s academic success.
To produce a steady supply of compelling, diverse stories that will nourish the imagination and excite even reluctant readers.

If these objectives resonate with you, I hope you’ll give my books a chance. The bias against self-published books is hard to overcome; major outlets refuse to review them, and only a few book bloggers are willing to give self-published books a chance (thank you, Latin@s in Kid Lit). Many are poorly written and shoddily produced, but when publishing gatekeepers exclude so many talented writers of color, self-publishing is often our only recourse. If we wait for the industry to change, another generation of children will grow up as I did—without the “books-as-mirrors” they need and deserve.

Born in Canada, Zetta Elliott earned her PhD in American Studies at NYU. Her poetry has been published in several anthologies, and her plays have been staged in New York and Chicago. Her essays have appeared in Horn Book Magazine, School Library Journal, and The Huffington Post. Her picture book, Bird, won the Honor Award in Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Contest and the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers. Elliott’s young adult novel, A Wish After Midnight, has been called “a revelation…vivid, violent and impressive history.” Ship of Souls, published in February 2012, was included in Booklist’s Top Ten Sci-fi/Fantasy Titles for Youth and was a finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Book Award. Her third novel, The Deep, was published in November 2013. She currently lives in Brooklyn.