Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

My house, that is. Today I emptied out a drawer set full of colored pencils, crayons, and stickers that my older kids had grown out of; my youngest took what she wanted to put with her stuff, and I washed out the drawer set (the plastic kind, you understand) and passed it on to my 16-year-old for her stuff. (And while I was at it, I washed out our 5 gallon water jug, which is one of those tasks I loathe and therefore put off for an embarrassingly long time.) I also went through more than half a stack of papers, gave the coloring pages to my youngest daughter’s friend for her younger brothers, and had my son shred the papers that I brought home from the PTA closet to shred and then forgot about until now. More things leaving my house!

As for a book review, I finished Arree Chung’s Don’t Cause Trouble over the weekend, and while I had my misgivings partway through, I ended up enjoying it. Ming makes for an engaging main character, and plenty of us can relate to having our moms cut our hair in less-than-cool styles as well as having to wear hand-me-down or secondhand clothes; it makes fitting in hard enough, and being a son of Asian immigrants just complicates things for Ming. On the one hand, he makes a couple of solid friends, which is a good start to middle school; on the other hand, family money troubles, some ugly racism, and an unexpected blow put Ming in a dark enough place to make a seriously bad decision. Can he fix his relationship with his friends afterwards–as well as some of the problems his family’s been struggling with?

Overall, Don’t Cause Trouble may have special appeal for boys and children of immigrants, but there’s enough in it to please a wide audience. I’ll let you know what my 11-year-old daughter thinks!