The Lotus Seed by Sherry Garland and Illustrated by Tatsuro Kiuchi

1. Title: The Lotus Seed

2. Author: Sherry Garland

3. Illustrator: Tatsuro Kiuchi

4. Publisher and Publishing Date: Harcourt, INC 1993

5. Genre: Vietnam Reflection, Multi-Cultural

6. Age range for which the book is appropriate: 5^th grade-onward

7. I think students would like this book because it deals with a complex theme in such a way that they are able to access it. I think they would also like the book because it is beautiful.

8. This book starts off with the narrator explaining how her grandmother watched the last emperor of Vietnam become nothing more than a name piece after the French invasion. She is given a lotus seed that she takes with her to America when her family flees Vietnam when the war between the south and north begins. Finally, the grandmother’s grandson plants the seed in mud and it grows into a beautiful flower that she shares the seeds with her own family. This is symbolic that Vietnam, their place of origin and a muddy desolate place, created beauty from its people.

9. Personal Response: I very much enjoyed this book because it was very symbolic of a people who was taken advantage of and eventually cast to the side and forced to move to America to reinvent themselves. This book reminds me a lot of the movie “The Golden Dragon” where there is an evil force that is over taking a beautiful peaceful land and peoples out of simple greed. I also connected this work to The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.

10. Teaching ideas: This book would work excellently as an introduction to The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, which is a work on the Vietnam War that is taught as a part of the curriculum in English III. I think this work brings out the subtle nature of the overarching themes of love and the relationship between killing insurgent soldiers, while at the same time watching a group of truly great people be killed when combined with the novel. The multimedia text I would use with this would be the movie Apocalypse Now Redux, and I would have students create a long term project board with a comic strip that combines the novel and the picture book together.