On her way home from school, a young girl asks her grandfather how to say "grandfather" in Cree-- she's dispirited to learn that he doesn't remember. His Cree words were stolen in childhood, when white colonists took Native children, forcing them to unlearn their customs and languages. Grandfather's story broke my heart; Granddaughter's determination to help him remember patched it back together. Beautiful, powerful, and essential.

I usually review picture books within a few weeks of their publication. But every now and then I stumble across a slightly older book that’s so unique, or moving, or thought-provoking that I just have to tell the world about it! Stolen Words, by Melanie Florence (published in September 2017) is all three of these things.

When a young girl (whose name we don’t find out) questions her aboriginal grandfather about his language, Cree, he reveals that his words were “stolen” when he was a child: he was taken away from his family together with other children and put in a school where he was forbidden to speak his own language.

Determined to help her grandfather rediscover “his” words, the girl gets hold of a Cree dictionary and encourages him to relearn it by teaching it to her.

This beautifully poignant story had me in tears while I was surrounded by strangers on a Vienna underground train! Knowing that it’s based on true events (even if the specific characters and situation are fictional) made it incredibly sad, yet the kindness of a small child towards her beloved grandfather and the close relationship between them is something truly magical.

A glossary and explanation at the back provide fascinating information about the words used in the book as well as the Cree language and dialects in general.

The illustrations skillfully differentiate between modern-day happenings and flashbacks from the grandfather’s childhood by means of variations in the amount of colour used (the modern-day scenes are brighter and more cheerful, while the scenes showing the grandfather as a boy look faded and drained of colour).

My only complaint is that the book is not longer – when I reached the last page I wanted to continue reading about the granddaughter and grandfather learning (or relearning) the Cree language together!!

This is a very poignant story, a story of a little girl asking her grandfather how to say a certain word in his Cree language. However, he is saddened because he does not remember his language, it has been stolen from him as a young boy. This story introduces to young readers the brutality of Native Canadian history, though in a profoundly artistic way, of their residential school system which was created for “the purpose of removing Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and assimilating them into the dominant Canadian culture, ‘to kill the indian in the child’” (Wikipedia).

The story and the artwork/illustrations blend harmoniously to create this beautiful yet emotional tale. The story takes you into an emotional roller-coaster ride from a happy, care-free day after school, to an anguishing moment when the grandfather retells his story of younger days. The most haunting image depicts sad, young Cree boys in residential school having their words taken away from them portrayed as a bird flying out of their mouths and it being locked up in a cage by the white man.

The little girl comforted her grandfather by giving him the dreamcatcher that she had made and presenting him with a gift the next day. She gave him a book, a book that consisted of the words he had lost. As he turned the pages, he whispered the words and they “felt familiar in his mouth.” And, as though they have been imprisoned within the pages, the words broke free from their cage as he uttered them once again.

I loved this book. I love books that are bilingual in that they tell the same story in two different languages. In the United States, we can learn something from this narrative. Where, with at least 350 languages are spoken (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015), I believe that it is important to integrate these languages in our schools and our daily lives, especially in children’s books, because they tell the story of our cultures and the history of how we became a nation presently.

This book review has also been published on my blog. Read this review and of others illustrated books at https://stadeodesign.wordpress.com/2019/07/07/stolen-words/

This is a difficult book for me to rate. It has one glaring problem. It's not the lovely, heart-warming story. It's not the warm, pretty illustrations. It's not the interesting glossary/pronunciation guide for the Plains Cree words. Actually, it's the English text... and in a book that's all about the importance of language and tradition, I found the writing choices rather appalling.

Each page features a section of the story written in Plains Cree and then one in English. The problem is that, in the English version, there are no quotation marks at all. In a book that heavily features a conversation between a grandfather and granddaughter, this is a really weird choice. I had trouble at times figuring out what was speech and what was straight narrative... until I realized that the Plains Cree text was properly punctuated! It also used italics to set off the foreign words, making the Plains Cree text clearer and more technically correct than the English text. It's just too bad I don't speak Plains Cree, or I could've read that version!

The illustrations are wonderful, and the story is both sad and ultimately hopeful. It gently introduces young children to the history of residential schools without getting too graphic or scary. The story is simply about recovering something that was lost (in this case, language), and the little girl gives her grandfather a wonderful gift.

I really wish I could've rated this one higher. But picture books that try to get artsy with the English language are one of my pet peeves. You don't go messing with grammar and punctuation when your audience is still learning the conventions of the language. Leave that stuff for YA and adult books.

Absolutely heartbreaking & beautiful!
Exquisite illustrations that accompany the tone of the story perfectly.
I really hope someone does a read-a-long or audio version of this.
It would have been wonderful to hear the Cree whispered in a grandfatherly voice.
Thank you NetGalley and Second Story Press for my DRC.

#KimotinãniwiwItwêwinaStolenWords #NetGalley

It's unthinkable that a small 13 page picture book could impact so deeply.
Stolen Words tells the story of a little girl full of dreams and love for her grandfather.
She asks him, one day when he picks her up from school, how to say "Grandfather" in Cree. He tells her the tragic story of being taken from home and beaten until they spoke white. She gifts him her dreamcatcher so he might dream of his soft words again.
This precocious little girl goes to school the next day and finds a book on Cree in the school library and presents it to her Grandfather. Who reads and remembers his words, his mother and promises to read to her in Cree.

This was a beautiful little book that should be in every school library.
The illustrations were incredible and very evocative. I especially loved the image of their words coming out of their mouths to be locked in a cage. It was heart wrenching.
The bond between Grandfather and Granddaughter is clearly a special one, easily discernable within this short book.

An eye-opening book, for all the right reasons. It's a pleasant tale of a girl trying to talk to her grandfather, but the difference is that granddad was a Cree Indian whom the white peoples packed off to schools, and had his native language (and clearly a lot more) drummed out of him. Luckily it has a happy ending, and it's glorious on the page – the words are dynamic black birds, and once they've been caged and stored away in the school they eventually get let loose as a finale. As an adult, I'm thankful for this for showing me my first ever instances of written Cree – just for trivial reasons, mind, nothing more academic. What it seems to show is that it's a complex language of lots of compound words, and fewer gender specifiers than English. Oh, and no capitalisation whatsoever. It's fortunate the original Cree volume had the space in its spreads for the English translation that's been added here, although according to this we don't use speech marks. This really lowers the readability of the English, especially with the poetic half-sentences of some of the text, which is a big shame. It's visually appealing, and important, and more should have gone into making this the definitive, open-to-all volume it deserves to be.

A little girl asks her grandfather for the word for grandfather in Cree, and he tells her the tale of how his words were stolen from him, while he was in residential school.

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This was such an amazing book when it was written only in English, but now native speakers of Plains Cree have translated this very touching story into Cree, so that children and adults can read this in their native language.

Highly recommended, and what a wonderful book to translate.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

A beautifully written and hauntingly drawn story about a little girl who wants to learn how to say Grandfather in Cree. Her grandfather explains that he no longer remembers as his words were stolen as a child.

This book was both beautiful and sad. The images were stunning and captivating and yet so haunting the way they showed how the words were stolen from the children in residential schools.

I loved the contrast of images between the past and the present with the present being colourful, bright and happy, and the past being darker, painful and uncomfortable.

It was also wonderful to see the story written in Cree as well as English, it felt as though in a small way this is one step in taking back a language that was unrightfully stolen. An incredibly dark and infuriating piece of Canadian history that needs to be shared to teach everyone why happened.