Author: Donna Jo Napoli
Illustrator: Kadir Nelson
Published Year: 2010
The story takes place in Narobi, Kenya and centers around the aged and wise Miti who grew up in the country of Kenya. Women from all over the land come to her with issues of food, clothes, and shelter. Mama Miti, whom the people call her, has one solution: plant a tree. Each tree she recommends to a woman has a special Kenyan name and serves a specific purpose such as providing timber to build shelter or providing protection as a thorn bush.
The author and illustrator portray the characters as we would view Africans and uses proper African terms to demonstrate the authenticity of the characters and story. If a teachers were to use this as a cultural novel, I would use it with upper elementary students and do some scaffolding with the students on the culture of Kenya and work on the meaning of the terms such as mukinduri. Overall, the story provides the reader with "teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime" moral through the view point of a woman.
This book was great. I really loved the illustrations of Kenya. I think that this book could also be used as a self selected text, if the author provided the students with a glossary in the back of the book. There were a lot of unfamiliar words in the story and I believe that if the students had some background information on those terms this book could be added to a teachers classroom library.
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