Tradition

This was a totally sweet little book and something that makes it additionally cool is that much of it is from Grace Lin's personal experience. The Year of the Dog offers good laughs and a lot of neat stuff about Chinese traditions. At first I thought, "Man, the Chinese really have a lot of superstitions and traditions!" but then I thought, well every culture has a lot of superstitions and traditions, right? I think about how our family eats the New Year's Pretzel on New Year's Day and we throw salt over our shoulder when we spill it, both are German and probably other cultures' traditions, too.

It was really interesting to learn about celebrating the Chinese New Year and Red Egg Parties and cool things like that. Grace is in grade school...I can't remember which grade, but probably fifth or sixth. She has an older sister and a younger sister. Her family is Taiwanese, but all of the children were born in the U.S. One thing I found that was interesting was that Grace has a Chinese name, Pacy, but she is called Grace at school because Pacy would be weird. Pacy is not a weird name, I don't think. It's a great name, and so is Grace.