Episode #74: What book do you wish you could live in?- with Mae Respicio
Welcome back to another great episode of Kids Ask Authors! Grace Lin and Mae Respicio answer this wonderful kid question.
TRANSCRIPTS:
Grace Lin: Hello, I'm Grace Lin, children's book author and illustrator of many books, including the middle grade novel When The Sea Turned To Silver, and the picture book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star. Today I am here with Mae Respicio, author of The House That Lou Built, Any Day With You and How To Win A Slime War, which will come out in 2021. Hi, Mae.
Mae Respicio: Hi, Grace. How are you?
Grace Lin: Good. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Mae Respicio: Thanks for having me.
Grace Lin: Are you ready for today's question?
Mae Respicio: I am. I'm ready. Bring them on.
Grace Lin: All right. Today's question is from a young person named Georgia, and they ask, "What book do you wish you could live in?"
Mae Respicio: Oh, Georgia, I love that question. Thank you for asking it. Okay. I didn't know what the question was going to be. So let me think really quickly. And I'm actually going to just quickly look it up, because I want to get the author-illustrator's name right. So I'm going to answer as kid me-
Georgia: What book do you wish you could live in?
Mae Respicio: And the book that kid Mae would have want to have lived in was one of my favorite picture books growing up was Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. And it's written, it looks like it was written and illustrated by Judy Barrett. And I loved that book so much. I can remember the illustrations so clearly. They were so detailed, these really intricate line drawings. And if I'm remembering right, it was all about a town where the only thing that they had to eat were sardines until somebody invented a machine that made food rain from the sky.
Grace Lin: I think that's the movie.
Mae Respicio: Was that the movie?
Grace Lin: Yeah, that's the movie. In the book, it just rains. It just magically rains all these different kinds of foods. And one day it's hot dogs. One day it's rains orange juice and the restaurants have no roofs, so people just sit and wait for the food to fall on their plates and things like that.
Mae Respicio: Do you remember the illustrations, though? I just remember there was one page where it had the town, maybe the downtown with the buildings and it had the names of the buildings. And then all of the pictures of just the food coming down from the sky. And I remember being in elementary school and that was the one book that all the kids wanted to check out. So once we got into the library, we would all run straight for that shelf and pull out the book and our librarian, Mr. Riley I think his name was, would sometimes tell me that I couldn't check it out because I needed to give other kids a chance. I don't know if I'd want to live in that book, because I don't know if I'd want to be in one book for too long. But I would love to just explore and then just be in that world and say, "Okay, food start raining. I'm here."
Grace Lin: It's so funny because when you said that, because I was thinking, what book would I want to be in? And I don't know if you've ever read the Raggedy Ann and Andy books.
Mae Respicio: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Grace Lin: So those books, not a lot happens in them. So I wouldn't say they're the most exciting books in the world, but if I was going to live in a book, maybe I would live in those because in those books they wander around and all of a sudden there's a soda fountain that pops out of nowhere with ice cream mud around it. Or there's a candy covered cookie bush. There's always these delicious, wonderful things popping up. I remember at one point there was, "Oh, look, there's cream puff mushrooms."
Mae Respicio: Yeah. I think any book with food. I would have loved to have lived in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and The Giant Peach and just walking around inside this juicy peach and taking huge chunks and huge bites out of it. So those were the books or the kinds of stories that I remember just getting lost in. So I would choose those and book hop and then eat my way through a bunch of books.
Grace Lin: It's so funny, because I was thinking the same thing, I would just go to books that had delicious, delicious food. I'd just keep going on and on and on. And finding all the most delicious food.
Grace Lin: It's funny because the most exciting books, so maybe the books that I like to read, I don't know if I'd really want to live in them though, because there's like, it's almost too scary some of them, you know.
Mae Respicio: Yeah, yeah. But it would be fun to just sort of peak in and live in that world for a little bit and then hop on out and then enter another book. I love that question.
Grace Lin: Though I get... I was trying to think of what my daughter would answer and I'm pretty sure she would say Harry Potter. [crosstalk 00:05:13] that idea of being in a world that you could be magic. Only if she could be a witch too, though. I think if she had to be a muggle, she'd be like forget it.
Mae Respicio: Yeah. No, thank you. I need my wand.
Grace Lin: So which book of your own do you think you would want to live in?
Mae Respicio: Which book of my own? Well each of my books has a very personal element to me, whether it's the cultural aspects or the setting and environment. So I would actually say that I've lived a little bit in my books. The first one was set around San Francisco, which is where I am right now. Any Day With You was set in Los Angeles near the beach, which is where I lived for a long time. So they have very familiar elements to what I've lived before. So I'd say I've kind of already lived them in some small way.
Grace Lin: So which one would you choose though?
Mae Respicio: Which one would I choose? I would probably choose Any Day With You, because it is set by the beach. And I love the ocean, especially during these sort of tumultuous times. I don't live super close to it right now, but I love to just be able to walk near the water and clear my head and listen to the waves roll in. And I would choose that one.
Grace Lin: Yeah, that sounds nice. I was thinking about my books, which one I would choose to live in. I would choose A Big Mooncake for Little Star because of the food thing again when it came to picture books. But for my novels, I'm similar to you, because I have these books of the year, the dog, The Year of the Rat.Those are basically based on my childhood. So I already lived those. I don't know. I don't think I'd go into those. So then it would leave my other more fantasy novels, like Where The Mountain Meets The Moon, Starry River Over The Sky, and When The Sea Turned To Silver. And When The Sea Turned To Silver, it talks about an endless winter. So I wouldn't choose that. Starry River Over the Sky, it talks about this big drought, because they're all waiting for rain, so I wouldn't choose that. So I would choose Where The Mountain Meets The Moon because that's got the best weather.
Mae Respicio: Oh perfect. So we've got things in common. We're all about the food and the good weather.
Grace Lin: Exactly. All right. Well that was awesome. Well, thank you so much, Mae, for answering this question and thank you so much, Georgia, for asking it. Bye.
Mae Respicio: Bye. Thank you so much.
Today’s BOOK REVIEW comes from Lillian. She’s reviewing: Stand Up Yumi Chan, by Jessica Kim.
My report is about the book, “Stand Up, Yumi Chang.” Yumi was walking home from Hagwon School when she saw a comedy club called the HaHa Club. She stopped in to see her favorite comedian, Jasmine Jaspers. Jasmine saw Yumi and mistook her for a kid attending the camp that wasn’t there the day before, and for the whole camp she assumed the identity of a kid named Kay Nakamura. At home wasn’t the quietest either - her sister Yuri quit medical school and was going to Asia with the Peace Corp. Her parents were furious. The restaurant the family had was falling behind on rent and had eight days to pay it back. Everything takes a turn when the real Kay Nakamura shows up at Yuri’s comedy camp. To know what happens next, you should read the book. I really liked this book because it was about pursuing your passions. Yumi wanted to be a comedian but her parents were very strict. The book did a good job of showing that families can have differences but still work them out.
Thank you Lillian!
More about TODAY’s AUTHORS:
Mae is author of the middle grade novels The House That Lou Built, Any Day With You, and How to Win a Slime War (out September 2021). She is the past recipient of a PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship and has been a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her writing & photography has been featured in many publications including Pregnancy Magazine, Working Mother Magazine, Patagonia, Pottery Barn Kids, Red Tricycle and The Bigger the Better the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty, Body Image, and Other Hazards of Being Female (Seal Press), and she worked with the Filipino-American community of Los Angeles to edit the nonfiction book Images of America: Filipinos in Los Angeles (Arcadia Publishing). For many years Mae also worked at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, developing, implementing, and overseeing top notch literary events, creative and screenwriting courses, and helping to build a thriving literary community. Mae lives with her family in the suburban wild of Northern California.
Grace Lin, a NY Times bestselling author/ illustrator, won the Newbery Honor for Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and her picture book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star, was awarded the Caldecott Honor. Grace is an occasional commentator for New England Public Radio , a video essayist for PBS NewsHour (here & here), and the speaker of the popular TEDx talk, The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf. She is the co-host of the podcast Book Friends Forever, a kidlit podcast about friendship and publishing (geared for adults). Find her facebook, instagram , twitter ( @pacylin) or sign up for her author newsletter HERE.
Special thanks to the High Five Books & Art Always Bookstore, Ms. Carleton’s 2nd grade class at Jackson Street School for their help with our kid questions and reviews.
