Kimchi & Calamari

Joseph Calderaro is an "eighth-grade optimist" whose "bag of barbecue chips is always half full." That is until he has a lousy 14th birthday and his teacher assigns a 1,500-word paper called Tracing Your Past: A Heritage Essay. The only trouble is, Joseph is adopted. Fourteen years ago he was left on the steps of a police station in Korea. His adopted parents are Italians living in New Jersey, and while he knows he's a Calderaro, he feels he can't claim the Italian heritage as his own. Kimchi and Calamari by Rose Kent follows Joseph as he questions his own identity and struggles to come up with answers about his heritage. Is he a real Korean? Is he Italian? Does it make a difference to him? I found myself liking Joseph right off the bat. And I loved the assignment he got to write about his heritage. I've done a lot of work tracing my own family's ancestors, so I know that feeling of wanting to identify with the people who came before you. Joseph's desire to know more about where he came from is extra complicated because of his adoption. But I admired the way he treats this issue as just one of many things he's thinking about in life. He is 14 after all, and so he's trying to decide who to ask to the year-end dance. He's also making new friends and trying to figure out how to bring up difficult subjects with his parents. Through it all Joseph mostly maintains his optimism, even while he gets into and out of trouble. I found myself cheering for him and thinking how refreshing it is to get to know a character who is upbeat most of the time. Kimchi and Calamari has many things for mother-daughter book clubs to like and talk about. Issues include communicating with your parents, what makes you part of a family, adoption, your family heritage, dating and more. And don't be surprised if you get hungry while reading it. The Italian food and Asian dishes described should offer plenty of ideas for what you can serve at a book club meeting. I highly recommend it for mother-daughter book clubs with girls aged 9 to 12.

Life is great for Joseph Calderaro on the last day of his thirteenth year. Then, on his fourteenth birthday, disaster (call it, really, an obstacle) strikes. His writing teacher assigns an ancestry paper--you know, explore your roots. You see, by nurture, Joseph is thoroughly Italian--until he looks in the mirror. Then he sees who he really is--by nature--Asian of some sort, Korean to be exact. Joseph Calderaro is adopted. "Kimchi & Calamari" is a thought-provoking novel written for the middle school crowd. Who am I, really? What I feel inside? What I see in the mirror? Yes, this is a first novel by a talented writer, Rose Kent, a novel which asks that universal question: Just who am I? On his fourteenth birthday Joseph gets fresh, fried calamari (squid if you don't know), prepared by his Italian-American mom, just-so-fresh. How fresh? Fresh off the dock from a day's fishing--the only and best way to eat squid. (I ate my first squid at a little restaurant in Venice, supposedly the catch of the day. After reading this novel and the description of its fried calamari, I have mentally backtracked and now know my squid was not caught the day I ate it. It was rubbery! I'm game (ha ha--the pun in that word) for most things, including squid, but not a rubbery substance that wouldn't chew into pulverized bits.) In his eighth-grade English class his teacher assigns an ancestry paper, a trace-your-roots paper as part of a national celebration and essay contest. Thus begins Joseph's search for his roots, the main problem of this juvenile fiction. Typically, other problems arise--just as in real life. In this case, Joseph wants to ask to the movies the most beautiful, athletic, popular, and rich girl in class, Kelly. Although he is too modest to tell his readers, but Joseph, the first-person narrator, is both funny and popular and cute. Kelly does accept. (But, of course, you are perceptive enough to know that Kelly's "looks" are just skin deep and that he will discover this fact by novel's end. Ah, come on, this is nearly always the outcome of this plot line. Consider this: I'm not telling how.) His Korean heritage? All he knows is that he was left in a basket at the door of the police station in his home town and adopted when he was a baby. So how does he trace his ancestry without his parents finding out and being hurt by his search? His best friend Nash, a computer guru, volunteers to help him search via the web, where he finds Jae, who might have information about his birth mother. Although teetering on senior citizen status, I enjoyed this book (as I do most well-written young adult books with interesting plots, characters, and situations. Although light-hearted, "Kimchi & Calamari" does raise a number of serious issues with personal identity as the central one. How DOES a Korean boy by birth discover that identity when he has sensitive, die-hard Italian parents? That, dear reader, is a wonderfully handled problem, and one well worth reading.

I first picked up this book because it sounded interesting and because our daughter is adopted and I know eventually she'll come home one day from school with homework on her family tree or heritage. I really liked this book and liked how the main character Joseph did his final paper on how he is a ethnic sandwich... being Korean on the outside and Italian on the inside. I enjoyed learning about Korea, a little about it's culture and the great Olympian Sohn Kee Chung. This would be a terrific book for adopted children, teachers to read themselves and out loud to their class. As well as for all teachers to realize there are other ways to do the Family Tree / Heritage papers. With Korean children I think that it's neat that there is a way for Korean children to find siblings and parents.

I read this wonderful book in a few hours and couldn't wait to share it with one of my classes. It is both funny and sad at times. A few tears were shed at the adoption "classifieds," but I finished it with a sense of contentment. A great book. After reading the first chapter, one of my students was so happy that I read a book about another Korean. He couldn't stop saying that he was Korean too.

Rose Kent's new novel, Kimichi & Calamari, is an excellent book on the topic of cultural identity. It tells the story of Joseph, a young boy who was adopted from Korea by an Italian American family. The catalyst for Joseph's struggles is a geneology report assigned in school. We watch as Joseph tries to find a way to fake his way through the report by choosing to write about a famous Korean athelete and pass him off as his ancestor. Along the way his curiousity about his actual birth family grows which leads him to some interesting places. It is easy to fall in love with Joseph and feel for the predicament he finds himself in. This book would make a great read aloud and discussion book to use with kids in the intermediate grades because the language, setting, and identity struggles are so authentic. Kent manages to teach us all about the struggles of children who are adopted without sounding preachy or condescending. Families formed through adoption should definitely buy this book for Joseph's insight into being adopted alone. Even children who are not adopted can benefit from seeing that they are not alone in asking the age old question "Who am I?". Buy this book!