Starred Review ALA Booklist (Thu Jul 01 00:00:00 CDT 1993)

Starred Review Say's stunning immigration story is a version of the American dream that includes adventure and discovery but no sense of arrival. He captures our restlessness, our homesickness, wherever we are. With the particulars of own family story, he universalizes everyone's quest for home, and he finds not one place but many, connection and also discontent. The journey isn't a straight line, but more like a series of widening circles, full of surprising twists and loops. As in the best children's books, the plain, understated words have the intensity of poetry. The watercolor paintings frame so much story and emotion that they break your heart. Looking at the people in this book is like turning the pages of a family photo album, the formal arrangements and stiff poses show love and distance, longing and mystery, beneath such elemental rites as marriage, leaving, and return. The story starts off as cheery adventure. Say's grandfather leaves Japan as a young man on an astonishing journey to the New World. He explores all kinds of places and meets all kinds of people and never thinks of returning home. The huge cities "bewildered yet excited him." He settles in California because he loves the light and the mountains and the lonely seacoast. He marries his childhood sweetheart from his village in Japan and brings her to the new country, and they have a child. But then as his daughter grows up (we see her posing stiffly with a blonde doll in a carriage), he begins to think about his own childhood and longs to go back. "He could not forget. Finally, when his daughter was nearly grown, he could wait no more. He took his family and returned to his homeland." The village is as he remembered it, and he laughs with his old friends. But his American daughter doesn't fit in the traditional culture. She's an outsider in the Japanese village in her Western hat and purse, as awkward as her father was when he first left home. They move to a city in Japan; she marries, and her son, Allen Say, is born. His grandfather tells him many stories about California and longs to see it again. But the war comes, described through the child's eyes ("Bombs fell from the sky and scattered our lives like leaves in a storm"): a single painting shows a group of refugees in a leveled city. Grandfather dies without seeing California again. But when his boy is nearly grown, he leaves home and goes to see the place his grandfather had told him about, and he stays in the U.S. and has a daughter, just as his grandfather did. But he says, "I can not still the longing in my heart." Like his grandfather, he has to return to Japan now and then. And as soon as he is in one country, "he is homesick for the other." The pictures echo each other and connect the generations and their places. Say's grandfather in tie and cardigan staring out the window in San Francisco, remembering the mountains and rivers of home, is like a self-portrait of Allen Say today. The landscapes evoke a variety of styles: from the mountain photography of Ansel Adams to the Japanese pastoral and the romantic French impressionists. The cover picture of the young traveler in his first too-large European clothes, clutching his bowler hat, has the sturdiness and poignancy of Chaplin. Allen Say has traveled and found riches everywhere. He captures what the Jewish American writer Irving Howe calls an "eager restlessness." The book is a natural companion to Say's other autobiographical picture book, Tree of Cranes (1991), about his childhood in Japan and his mother remembering her childhood Christmas in California. Both are books to share across generations and in oral history projects with older students. Every child who's pored over strange old family pictures or heard stories of "back home" will relate to this, whether home was across the border or far across the sea or a midwestern farm. The story has special immediacy for immigrants, like me. It's also about all those who long for where they came from, even while they know they can't go home again.

School Library Journal Starred Review (Mon Feb 06 00:00:00 CST 2023)

Gr 1-4 Allen Say's beautifully written Caldecott Award-winning memoir of his grandfather's life (Houghton Mifflin, 1993) is treated with care in this expressive production. His grandfather traveled as a young man, finding beauty wherever he went and eventually settled in California. His love for Japan, however, soon called him to return to the land of his birth. Yet, through war and change, a part of him still loved California. The author chronicles the birth of his mother and of himself. California is now his home but, like his grandfather, he feels the tug of his Japanese heritage as well. This lovely circular story about family and tradition embraces the concept of home in a way that many immigrants will understand. The poignant story is nicely narrated by B. D. Wong. The original music by Ernest V. Troost begins with a Japanese flavor, but adopts a slightly more Western tone as the story progresses, beautifully complementing the text. Say's lovely watercolor illustrations, created like a family album, are scanned iconographically creating a feeling of movement. The production concludes with a 2008 interview with the author where viewers can learn more about his life as well as how the book was created. The CD contains the sound track from the DVD. This is an exceptional program that calls to the heart. Teresa Bateman, Brigadoon Elementary School, Federal Way, WA

Horn Book (Thu Apr 01 00:00:00 CST 1993)

Say's grandfather travels throughout North America as a young man but, unable to forget his homeland, returns to Japan with his family, where the author is born. Say now lives in California and returns to his native land from time to time. 'The funny thing is, the moment I am in one country, I am homesick for the other. I think I know my grandfather now.' The immigrant experience has rarely been so poignantly evoked as it is in this direct, lyrical narrative, accompanied by soft-toned watercolors.

Kirkus Reviews

The funny thing is, the moment I am in one country, I am homesick for the other,'' observes Say near the end of this poignant account of three generations of his family's moves between Japan and the US. Say's grandfather came here as a young man, married, and lived in San Francisco until his daughter wasnearly grown'' before returning to Japan; his treasured plan to visit the US once again was delayed, forever as it turned out, by WW II. Say's American-born mother married in Japan (cf. Tree of Cranes, 1991), while he, born in Yokohama, came here at 16. In lucid, graceful language, he chronicles these passages, reflecting his love of both countries—plus the expatriate's ever-present longing for home—in both simple text and exquisitely composed watercolors: scenes of his grandfather discovering his new country and returning with new appreciation to the old, and pensive portraits recalling family photos, including two evoking the war and its aftermath. Lovely, quiet- -with a tenderness and warmth new to this fine illustrator's work. (Nonfiction/Picture book. 4+)"

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Say transcends the achievements of his Tree of Cranes and A River Dream with this breathtaking picture book, at once a very personal tribute to his grandfather and a distillation of universally shared emotions. Elegantly honed text accompanies large, formally composed paintings to convey Say's family history; the sepia tones and delicately faded colors of the art suggest a much-cherished and carefully preserved family album. A portrait of Say's grandfather opens the book, showing him in traditional Japanese dress, a young man when he left his home in Japan and went to see the world.'' Crossing the Pacific on a steamship, he arrives in North America and explores the land by train, by riverboat and on foot. One especially arresting, light-washed painting presents Grandfather in shirtsleeves, vest and tie, holding his suit jacket under his arm as he gazes over a prairie:The endless farm fields reminded him of the ocean he had crossed.'' Grandfather discovers that the more he traveled, the more he longed to see new places,'' but he nevertheless returns home to marry his childhood sweetheart. He brings her to California, where their daughter is born, but her youth reminds him inexorably of his own, and when she is nearly grown, he takes the family back to Japan. The restlessness endures: the daughter cannot be at home in a Japanese village; he himself cannot forget California. Although war shatters Grandfather's hopes to revisit his second land, years later Say repeats the journey:I came to love the land my grandfather had loved, and I stayed on and on until I had a daughter of my own.'' The internal struggle of his grandfather also continues within Say, who writes that he, too, misses the places of his childhood and periodically returns to them. The tranquility of the art and the powerfully controlled prose underscore the profundity of Say's themes, investing the final line with an abiding, aching pathos: ``The funny thing is, the moment I am in one country, I am homesick for the other.'' Ages 4-8. (Oct.)