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I would feel uncomfortable giving this to children because it's a book of mixed messaging. The protagonist is a girl who does things that are largely kind of rude (stapling her brother's hair to his pillow, intentionally putting a fly in ice cubes, gluing her brother's slippers to the floor), but it's framed in a way that feels like it's trying to make you feel bad that she can't? Which I don't think was the intention, but the failure to really highlight the negative consequences of the behaviours gives it that feeling.

There are two points where the girl says she's "not allowed to walk backwards (to school/from school) anymore," and besides the sign saying "don't walk"... it doesn't show much about how it can be bad for you. I'm not looking for there to be a scene of the girl getting hit by a car, but it just feels like a weird quip.

The other thing I don't like is the ending? Where if she was just continuing to be really obnoxious and trying to figure out new misadventures, it also wouldn't suffer from the awkward framing as much. It'd at least frame everything as being annoying and her either as not recognising it as being obnoxious or as her knowing these things bother people but trying them anyway. But the ending says that she's "allowed to say the opposite of what she means forevermore," with the illustration of her hiding a stapler behind her back while hugging her mother and saying "I'm sorry." This is just... really off? Because again, it relies so heavily on reading it with someone else who will point out why this is really negative behaviour, especially as it shows that she doesn't feel bad for any of the pain her brother or mother have gone through in the previous examples.

Perhaps useful for teaching kids good and/or safe behaviours if you read it with them? But I think there are better ways of doing that, and I don't think this is a good book to read on their own.

Oh, it also feels like the story is drawing from Dennis the Menace but isn't as amusing because the acts aren't fleshed out and just seem more bothersome.

Additional thoughts found here: eldritch.cafe/@whatanerd/111476908098590779

This book can be quite fun to do with kids, and it's pretty enjoyable as a quasi-story with puzzles in the middle. The logic puzzles are sometimes difficult to understand, especially for kids who may just be learning English or starting to learn to read. They're a bit verbose and can be quite hard to follow, with some aspects not being very clear.

There have been a lot of times where I've had kids just tell me that the answer "could be anything," and I can't quite disagree because I felt the same way. But the maths problems (which are the first four chapters) are where this book really shines. They're not overly complex, and they are possible. There are moments where it feels like the answer could be anything, but if you try to work it out? You'll realise that it's not. That part feels much more solid, while the rest just feels unnecessarily frustrating.

Still cute, still amusing, and can still be useful.

This is another book that my students reminded me about. It's written in a very rhythmic way, ensuring that you try to follow its beat. I think it's pretty good up until the whole "saying grace" part, but that's because I'm personally not a fan of including religion in children's books (and that's largely because of the oversized influence of religion on a person's life before they're even prepared to decide for themselves).

I'm also mentioning that inclusion because I think it's important for people to know before going into the book, since that's also a potential conversation someone might want to have with any kids they read this with.

It's also fun because it includes a quick recipe for bibimbap, along with a mention that the recipe is as unique as either what's available or what each Korean family includes in it. I think that's quite nice. More kids books should encourage additional skills by including recipes and how to make them with adults in their lives.

I reread this today to see if it'd work for my English lessons, especially since I work with Korean kids who occasionally like to see books about other Korean people. One of them reminded me that this book exists.

And then I realised I don't like it as much as I previously did. Before, I thought it was a nice way to introduce kids (particularly to the idea of microaggressions and how refusing to pronounce someone's name correctly can hurt them). It's also an exploration of a Korean girl who decides to keep her name, rather than taking an 'American' one (in this instance, as many East Asian people often get pressured into taking European names because of the perceived difficulty of saying their names).

I still like that, but I feel like the author and editor needed to re-read it again. The book is primarily about how non-Korean people mispronounce Unhei's name, but the author provides a poor transliteration for her name ('Yoon-hey' or 'Oon-hey' would've been a closer approximation, but the author chose 'Yoon-hye', which doesn't work for English-speakers)... and it's continued to cause people to mispronounce her name, including non-Korean teachers who've read this book to their classes. In fact, I thought I was mispronouncing it until I looked up a pronunciation for it and found that... I wasn't.

The editor should've read it back and out loud with the author. I think that should be a normal practice, especially in the instances where people are transliterating names. Honestly, I think it should happen every time someone puts in a pronunciation guide for something. The book's point shouldn't be lost because of something so simple to catch.

This book is terrible, and a good majority of it feels like we're just pointing at non-European cultures and going "Hahaha! This is weird!" I would not include this in a primary school class, and I would not give this to any young child that I know. I would only use it as an exploration in the problems of publishing, particularly in non-fiction literature that kids have been presented with.

First and foremost, there is one singular European culture that's pointed at, and it's because they include Swiss cheese (because bacteria are added to the milk, and the gas they expel creates the holes in the cheese). Two other foods which are made to seem incredibly foreign (by the use of images) but are also used in Europe include rose petals (not sure how those are weird) and seaweed in the form of 'carrageenan' (and could be found in ice cream as a thickener).

The rest are either generically attributed to Native Americans (cactus? for all of them?) or Africans (blood? a lot of people, even in Europe, eat blood), attribute foods to specific countries, or have absolutely no mention of where they're from with imagery doing the implication for them.

On top of being poor representation of food (and also entirely out of date, though I keep finding it on recommended lists for children with limited reading skills), it's also just... bad? So even if the information wasn't purely a eurocentric view of food, it would also just be boring. No information about how things are used, how they're prepared, how they're eaten, etc. Just silly quips that effectively read: "People eat durian! It stinks! How weird!"

You'd be better off exploring a cookbook with a child rather than this garbage.

First an foremost: You're better off reading many of the books that he uses as resources before you are this one because he super-oversimplifies everything in ways that remove context and information. (This includes Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks and Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil.)

Second, he intentionally erases a huge chunk of history in order to (attempt to) achieve his stated goal in the introduction, which is to convince people to be Marxists. He completely writes out any time anarchists even participate in something, and it's particularly egregious when talking about the IWW (an organisation that has been very much shaped by interactions with anarchists). He intentionally overlooks people (socialists and anarchists) who could make his point simply because they can't be vaguely referenced as 'communist' and co-opted into Marxist thought. It's really blatantly frustrating.

That said, there are some points where I was made curious. But that would've happened with any other book, to be honest.

People, including anarchists, often hold David Graeber up as some bright light of philosophy. He's not horrible, but he's always got a lot of glaring holes.

In this particular book, he has some really frustrating points where he applies a regional history to an entire movement or moment (e.g., applies a lens of NYC's way of doing OWS while neglecting to recognise how OWS operated in other places). This is something he always does, and it's really to the detriment of whatever he's developed to share. It's pretty ahistorical because it just neglects that many other areas have our own needs, even while stating otherwise. It also acts as if OWS was a primarily anarchist movement, which is something that I feel is very context dependent. Perhaps it was in some places, but others? Not so much. If that were true, I feel like it wouldn't have been very welcoming to US-liberals and right-libertarians, and it very much was.

It's very odd.

The beginning of this book also sets a tone that is constant throughout Graeber's work: Despite pointing to feminisms (scarcely, as he only ever seems to have referenced them when specifically engaging with feminism and never any other moment), he often plays into the same patriarchal structures and attitudes. A very clear example of this is the desire to call things "drama" or "infighting," as if there can't possibly be any other reason for there to be tension between people in a group; he points to "low numbers" of cases of reported sexual assault as being an indicator that it wasn't common, but he neglects to recognise that most people aren't reporting it because it's not taken serious (and in a movement that he claims as primarily anarchist, it's understandable that they wouldn't report to the police at all).

Even if the tensions weren't from any form of abuse, he neglects the ways in which a lot of manarchists often try to push other people out and retain the same hierarchies they're supposed to be fighting against. This isn't "drama," and it's not "infighting." It's actually holding people accountable, and that was rarely (if ever) done by people of hegemonic demographics.

It's not bad, but these are the things that annoyed me most.

This book is one of the few that I found that talk about sex workers in a nuanced light. This is largely because it's a book that's by sex workers, and that makes all the difference.

As someone reads through it, they'll start seeing the connections between a lot of different issues and sex work in particular: trans and queer issues, homelessness, misogyny and violence against women, migrant issues, race, and so on. It provides one more link in a chain that highlights the ways in which everything is connected, which is something that more people really need to be cognizant of.

There are a few parts that I take issue with, and it's largely because they try to be... more polite to people than I think they ought to be. There's a part of the text where they say something along the lines that they want to sit down and have genuine conversations with anti-prostitution feminists who they openly acknowledge they disagree with to make their positions clear, but many of those people that they list are also known TERFs (Julie Bindel). I think such additions of "wanting to talk" are really just pointless, and they most certainly were in 2018 (when the book was published). The belief that we can just talk to these people and make them change their minds... I struggle with that because a lot of time has been wasted on just talking with these people, and they haven't budged an inch. In fact, they've entrenched further.

So while everything else was great and really informative and helped build a lot of connections between issues, I really just wish they would've removed these elements of "sitting down and nicely talking" with people who have shown themselves to be openly hostile and violently aggressive to calm discourse.