SuitabookWatercress
Andrea Wang and Jason Chin
- Reading
- Read the illustrations alongside the words, pause before and after the memories are shared, and invite the child to notice changing feelings without requiring a personal family comparison.
- Themes
- Embarrassment and understanding: The girl feels chagrin when her parents excitedly gather watercress, then hears painful memories that lead towards understanding. The emotional movement appears to value listening and reconsideration, although the full resolution is unclear.
- Family history and migration: Watercress connects a family's life in the United States with experiences reaching back to famine years and presents dimensions of family life across time. The book appears to use family memory to illuminate historical hardship and present-day experience, without enough detail to judge every viewpoint or emphasis.
- Everyday objects carrying meaning: Watercress is both the food gathered by the roadside and the object through which the family's experiences and moods are conveyed. The book leaves its stance open to more than one reading.
- Worth knowing
- The book could suit shared reading when you can pause around the parents' painful memories and the family's famine-related history, rather than treating the story only as a lesson about food.