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THINK OF A CHILD'S MIND AS A GARDEN. Obviously what adults plant in that garden affects it; unfortunately, children's books often have shallow roots in the soil of immediate social trends and problems, as well as market demands. Finding good books that go deep is difficult. For example, five out of the seven new books under review here are about understanding other cultures (the sixth is about avoiding environmental disaster, the seventh about tap-dancing). Such sameness of subject matter is troubling. Yet most of these books display tempting beauty and offer medicinal uses. And one, which stands alone because it examines the author's own culture closely, belongs in horticulturalist's heaven.
Neither the title nor the cover of Michele Marineau's The Road to Chlifa (Northern Lights/Red Deer College, 144 pages, $9.95 paper), translated by Susan Ouriou, does justice to this story of life-destroying war, soul-destroying peace, and young love. (I might have titled it Anemones and asked the cover illustrator to scatter these red flowers across a mountainside to represent the blood of gods on Mount Lebanon.) The story, which won the 1992 Governor General's Award in its original French edition, is about a 17-year-old Lebanese boy adjusting to life in Montreal after escaping war-blasted Beirut. Karim's simmering rage explodes when crass, bullying, racist French Canadian students molest a fellow refugee, a Vietnamese girl. Then, recovering in hospital from a near-fatal knife wound suffered while rescuing the girl, he makes sense of his ordeals in his homeland where his first and second loves both died violently. Although stretches of the story read like a mere travel guide, the climax is truly poignant and the resolution thoughtful.
War, young love, and racism also figure prominently in Rosalie's Battles (Ragweed, 91 pages, $5.95 paper), by Ginette Anfousse, a former winner of the Mr. Christie Award. Translated by Linda Gaboriau and part of a series for children aged 10 to 13 that includes Rosalie's Big Dream (about tap-dancing, friendship, and dreams), Rosalie's Battles begins with a racism-based fight among schoolchildren and leads to revelations about the sufferings of true victims of war. But what Rosalie learns about a Vietnamese...