This study applies Asian Critical Theory to conduct a content analysis of the middle-grade novel Maizy Chen’s Last Chance. Guided by three key tenets, Asianization, transnational contexts, and (re)constructive history, we examine how the novel disrupts racialized stereotypes, challenges the perpetual foreigner narrative, and recovers marginalized episodes of Chinese American history. Findings center on three thematic insights. First, the novel’s portrayal of the forever foreigner stereotype shows how Chinese Americans, regardless of birthplace or citizenship, are repeatedly positioned as outsiders through racialized rhetoric, underscoring the persistence of Asianization. Second, the novel highlights the contrast between first-generation immigrants’ deep ties to their homeland and later generations’ more distant connections, illustrating the complexity of diaspora identities within transnational contexts. Third, Lucky’s migration from Guangdong to San Francisco to Minnesota demonstrates how multi-generational storytelling restores neglected histories, fulfilling the aims of (re)constructive history. Pedagogical implications suggest that Maizy Chen’s Last Chance offers rich opportunities for classroom engagement. Ultimately, the study affirms that children’s literature can serve as both a mirror and a platform for recovering erased histories, strengthening identity across generations.
Children’s nonfiction frequently renders plants as static objects of didactic knowledge, taking their lack of agency for granted. Juxtaposing critical plant studies and nonfiction studies, this article explores how creative nonfiction picturebooks challenge such representations and reframe plant agency beyond a simple binary of absence or presence. Through a phytopoetic lens (Ryan, 2023) that treats plants as both literary constructs and agentic matter, the analysis examines two texts: The Poetry of Oracle (2021) and The Magic and Mystery of Trees (2019). The former reveals semiotic agency, showing plants’ engagement in shaping human language. The latter uncovers quotidian agency, indicating plants’ mediation of everyday human practices. The study argues that these books do not offer final answers about plants but instead function as intermediational sites where botanical materiality, representational form, and reading practice knot together to craft plant agency. It demonstrates a reading with plants rather than merely about plants, which may inspire an ethic of care rooted in the relational world-making of vegetal life.
This analysis suggests that Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905) reframes imperial exploitation through institutional mechanisms of assessment and control. By placing the novel within the context of nineteenth-century diamond economies and communication systems, it argues that the seminary functions through a hidden curriculum where acknowledgment depends on financial status rather than personal conduct. Detailed examinations of the telegram and bakery scenes reveal how alterations in economic standing precipitate corresponding shifts in social recognition, thereby illustrating a process of pedagogical valuation dictated by circumstance rather than unwavering ethical principles. Consequently, within this structure, individuals’ value and standing are presented as products of economic conditions rather than immutable moral codes. The subsequent examination explores the manifestation of this evaluative framework within the characters’ actions: Sara Crewe redistributes acknowledgment via acts of compassion, Miss Minchin mandates adherence to financial status, and Lavinia Herbert serves as an internal benchmark for educational assessment, thereby illustrating the internalization and perpetuation of institutional norms through peer dynamics in settings that stifle critical analysis. Employing a framework of origin, cyclical patterns, and intangible status, this article argues that economic worth is transformed into symbolic recognition and maintained within the confines of the school.
This article examines adult rereading of a childhood text through the lens of communal re-memorying, proposing collaborative rereading as both a methodological and pedagogical intervention. Drawing on Allison Waller’s work on rereading and re-memorying, alongside Margaret Mackey’s memory studies, we present a shared rereading of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Pest (1992/1968). Rather than treating rereading as a solitary return to a childhood text, we foreground remembering together as a dialogic practice that makes visible the relational, spatial, and educational dimensions of reading across the lifespan. Using Waller’s three-stage process of remembering, rereading, and shared analysis, we explore how memory and forgetting shape adult engagements with Ramona, particularly in relation to schooling and the hidden curriculum. Our analysis demonstrates how behaviors remembered as misbehavior are reinterpreted through adult perspectives shaped by pedagogical experience, including intergenerational read-aloud practices. We argue that rereading renders adult mediation visible, complicating notions of the “hidden adult” by situating rereading within everyday educational contexts. Finally, we show that forgetting—especially the loss of narrative detail—functions as a productive analytical site, revealing how childhood texts endure through affective and relational associations rather than comprehensive recall. By positioning communal rereading as a mode of inquiry, this article contributes to scholarship on rereading and the paracanon.
This article details a qualitative media analysis of 20 books that won the Etisalat Award from 2009–2020 compared to 9 picturebooks that won the Middle East Book Award from 2006–2023. The Etisalat Award, renamed the International Prize for Arabic Children's Literature in 2025, was established in 2009 by the United Arab Emirates Council on Books for Young People, the national branch of the International Council on Books for Young People. Restructured in 2013 to honor the best text and best illustrated books created for children, birth to 14 years old, the Etisalat Award highlights the artistic productions created by authors, illustrators, and publishers. Designed to promote Arabic books to children and families, creators are incentivized through the award process to publish high-quality children's books. The Middle East Outreach Council's Middle East Book Award in the United States is designed to honor books for children and young adults that help promote a better understanding of the Middle East. Thematic analysis revealed a need for Etisalat award-winning books (a) to emphasize children's perspectives to engage children in the plot sequence, and (b) to continue to raise the bar of children's book publishing standards through child-centric works of art.
