Grace Lin
Grace Lin is an author.
Writer and illustrator, and the second half of that is not decoration. Grace Lin's books are designed objects: full-colour plates, chapter ornaments, a visual scheme carrying as much of the storytelling as the prose does, which is why they work equally well for a child reading alone and an adult reading aloud.
Her subject has stayed consistent across more than twenty-five books. She puts young Asian and Asian American characters at the centre of ordinary stories and fantastical ones alike, and she has been an open advocate for that kind of representation in children's publishing rather than treating it as a private preference. The everyday books are gentle and observational, a Taiwanese American childhood rendered without exoticism and without apology. The fantasies braid Chinese folk tales into original plots, so that a story a character tells early on quietly becomes load-bearing later.
She is a Newbery, Geisel and Caldecott honoree, an unusual triple because those three awards recognise different things: a novel, a beginning reader, a picture book. Very few people work well at all three scales. That she does is why her readers tend to stay with her as they get older instead of ageing out.
Books (4)
Where to start with Grace Lin
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon first. It is the book that shows what she can do at full stretch, a quest built out of Chinese folk tales, illustrated in colour throughout, and structured so that the inset stories keep turning up again with weight on them. Read it aloud if you have anyone to read it to.
When the Sea Turned to Silver belongs to the same world and uses the same method, so it is the one to reach for next if the first worked on you.
For the realist Lin, The year of the dog is a warm, funny, small-scale book about a Taiwanese American girl trying to work out what she is good at, and it is the better introduction for a reader who finds fantasy heavy going. Ling & Ting Together in All Weather is for much younger readers, twin sisters in short comic episodes, and it is considerably better than the beginning-reader format usually allows.