Looking for a book that will make you unintentionally snort out your breakfast? Clutch your chest in despair? Keep you up into the wee hours of the morning? Change your mind, teach you something new, make you remember something you’d forgotten? Well, you’ve come to the right place!
I have always loved children’s books: when I was a child myself and more recently, when I had children of my own. Living in Hong Kong however, has meant we don’t have access to the same wide and varied range of English language books as you’d find in North American or European bookshops. In particular, I find myself constantly despairing at the lack of diverse reads and translated world literature in local bestseller and popular book lists. This sorry state of affairs prompted me to start a book review blog in 2018.
On Stories That Stay With Us, my two children and I regularly post our honest reviews of English language children’s books that we have read, individually or together, and loved. We cover all genres – classic and contemporary, wordless and wordful, quirky and contemplative, prose and poetry, graphic novels and chapter books. We try to be as inclusive, eclectic and wide-ranging as possible as our goal is to recommend age-appropriate, non-mainstream storybooks to all readers: children, parents, educators and librarians alike. Our reviews are also driven by my own personal ambition, to read and review as many well-written, authentic and thoughtful books about and set in Asian cultures as possible, books where Asia is not just a setting or a plot device or a tourist attraction. Asia is a place where people live, and love, and are happy, not just a place that everyone wants to escape from.
Most importantly, the stories we blog about must be so compelling that they affect us, provoke a reaction from us in some way, and remain with us, like the memories of the worst and best days of our lives.
Above are some of the books we’ve previously reviewed. You can click on the links on the covers to read the the full reviews.
The universe of children’s book is vast and we know there are still many, many books out there that we have not yet discovered, that we need to read and rave about, so if you know of a book that we haven’t reviewed but we should, please do get in touch. If you’d like to sign up for notifications of new posts on our book review blog, you can sign up here.
Read, read, and keep reading. There is no better way to become yourself.
Maureen Tai 