Chen has been creating beautiful, entertaining, and deeply moving picture books over the past twelve years. To depict the old culture of ancient China, he has relied upon myth and legend in many of his books.
Skipping Stone Award 2010
Selected for the 2009/2010 Great Lakes Great Books Award ballot for
grades 68.
Editor's Choice Award, Library Media Connection
"Chen Jiang Hong was a small boy when this tumultuous period began,
and in these illustrated pages he captures the bewildering
cruelties wreaked on the people of his neighborhood in a northern
Chinese city. [...] What makes this memoir especially interesting -
and thought-provoking - is the way Chen conveys the consuming
political hysteria of the time: Having witnessed the awful acts on
Mao's cultural shock troops, the boy was nonetheless thrilled when,
at 8, he was finally old enough to wear the armband of the Little
Red Guard." - Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal
In its excellence in representing political upheaval through the
eyes of a child, this book belongs next to Peter Sís’s The Wall; in
its directness, next to the work of Allen Say. The indefatigable
energy of Chen’s brush, though, is all his own.” Publishers
Weekly, Starred Review
"This powerful work joins [the] growing list of outstanding memoirs
about the ear." - School Library Journal, Starred Review
"The beautifully detailed, somber ink and watercolor paintings
vibrantly capture 1960s China from a child's perspective, and the
generous page size allows Chen free reign in laying out and
sequencing his images: half a dozen small paintings of ration
tickets and scarce foodstuffs along the top of one page, for
example, or a dizzying panorama of crowds at a rally sprawling
across two others. The prose is lean and elegant, but the story it
recounts is hardly bedtime material. With this intensely personal
family history, Chen moves into Art Spiegelman territory, marking
Mao and Me as a Cultural Revolution counterpart to Maus, slighter
and more understated but with a similar emotional punch." - Jing
Daily
"Chen Jiang Hong combines his skills as author and illustrator in
this exquisite tale of his own childhood in China. Through simple
prose and traditional Chinese style of art, the author reveals
seemingly innocent details of a child’s life during the Cultural
Revolution. The underlying story is both revealing and
heartbreaking, its elegant subtlety drawing shivers down the
reader’s spine.
Marketed as a children’s book, Mao and Me is so much more than an
entertaining story. The watercolor illustrations set the tone for
the narrative, their crisp details a sharp contrast to the spare
words that reveal the tragedy of the larger story. This is a book
that should be read by parents and children together, so that the
unspoken history can be elaborated. Mao and Me, while describing
life at a particular time in a particular place, is also a
cautionary tale for every culture and generation." - Deborah Adams,
Curled Up With a Good Kid's Book
Skipping Stone Award 2010
Selected for the 2009/2010 Great Lakes Great Books Award ballot for
grades 6–8.
Editor's Choice Award, Library Media Connection
"Chen Jiang Hong was a small boy when this tumultuous period began,
and in these illustrated pages he captures the bewildering
cruelties wreaked on the people of his neighborhood in a northern
Chinese city. [...] What makes this memoir especially interesting -
and thought-provoking - is the way Chen conveys the consuming
political hysteria of the time: Having witnessed the awful acts on
Mao's cultural shock troops, the boy was nonetheless thrilled when,
at 8, he was finally old enough to wear the armband of the Little
Red Guard." - Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal
“In its excellence in representing political upheaval through the
eyes of a child, this book belongs next to Peter Sís’s The Wall; in
its directness, next to the work of Allen Say. The indefatigable
energy of Chen’s brush, though, is all his own.” – Publishers
Weekly, Starred Review
"This powerful work joins [the] growing list of outstanding memoirs
about the ear." - School Library Journal, Starred Review
"The beautifully detailed, somber ink and watercolor paintings
vibrantly capture 1960s China from a child's perspective, and the
generous page size allows Chen free reign in laying out and
sequencing his images: half a dozen small paintings of ration
tickets and scarce foodstuffs along the top of one page, for
example, or a dizzying panorama of crowds at a rally sprawling
across two others. The prose is lean and elegant, but the story it
recounts is hardly bedtime material. With this intensely personal
family history, Chen moves into Art Spiegelman territory, marking
Mao and Me as a Cultural Revolution counterpart to Maus, slighter
and more understated but with a similar emotional punch." - Jing
Daily
"Chen Jiang Hong combines his skills as author and illustrator in
this exquisite tale of his own childhood in China. Through simple
prose and traditional Chinese style of art, the author reveals
seemingly innocent details of a child’s life during the Cultural
Revolution. The underlying story is both revealing and
heartbreaking, its elegant subtlety drawing shivers down the
reader’s spine.
Marketed as a children’s book, Mao and Me is so much more than an
entertaining story. The watercolor illustrations set the tone for
the narrative, their crisp details a sharp contrast to the spare
words that reveal the tragedy of the larger story. This is a book
that should be read by parents and children together, so that the
unspoken history can be elaborated. Mao and Me, while describing
life at a particular time in a particular place, is also a
cautionary tale for every culture and generation." - Deborah Adams,
Curled Up With a Good Kid's Book
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