Patricia Polacco is one of those authors that every child should experience. She clearly loved her craft, and her books cover topics like suffering, siblings, and culture. These books, too, are usually available at libraries. I love the depth of her books which don’t condensed to children, but she examines issues of life with them using culture, people, and circumstances that are real.
Interview & Patricia on her life
From Simon & Schuster synopsis:
An Irish family stays together with the help of Fiona’s talent for making one-of-a-kind lace in this heartwarming immigration story from the New York Times bestselling creator of The Keeping Quilt.
Many years ago, times were hard in all of Ireland, so when passage to America becomes available, Fiona and her family travel to Chicago. They find work in domestic service to pay back their passage, and at night Fiona turns tangles of thread into a fine, glorious lace. Then when the family is separated, it is the lace that Fiona’s parents follow to find her and her sister and bring the family back together. And it is the lace that will always provide Fiona with memories of Ireland and of her mother’s words: “In your heart your true home resides, and it will always be with you as long as you remember those you love.”
This generational story from the family of Patricia Polacco’s Irish father brims with the same warmth and heart as the classic The Keeping Quilt and The Blessing Cup, which Kirkus Reviews called “deeply affecting” in a starred review, and embraces the comfort of family commitment and togetherness that Patricia Polacco’s books are known for.
From Pengiun Random House: Larnel doesn’t know his neighbor, Mrs. Katz, very well, until he asks her to adopt an abandoned kitten. Mrs. Katz agrees on one condition: that Larnel helps her take care of the kitten she names Tush. When Larnel starts spending more and more time with Mrs. Katz to help with Tush, Mrs. Katz tells him stories about coming to America from Poland and about the good times she spent with her late husband. As Larnel grows to love Mrs. Katz, he also learns about the common themes of hardship and triumph in each of their cultures.
Some of Polacco’s favorite books as a child included Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, The Tall Mother Goose by Fedor Rojankovsky, Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss. Among the contemporary authors and illustrators, she admires are Jerry Pinkney, Gloria Jean Pinkney, Tomie dePaola, Alan Say, Virginia Hamilton, Jan Brett, and Lois Lowry.
A learning disability kept Polacco from learning to read until she was 14. Years later, she celebrated the assistance she received from a caring teacher her picture book Thank You, Mr. Falker. The same kids who teased her about her poor reading skills praised Polacco’s artwork. Art was something she could do easily and in a 2013 presentation in Wichita, Kansas, Polacco said, “For me, art is like breathing.”