If recent children's books are any indication, we might be led to believe that boy-wizards who fight evil and that children lucky enough to embark on wild adventures exist only in Britain or the United States. In fact, why does almost every story worth telling seem to take place only on one or the other side of the Atlantic?
There's a one-word explanation: access. What we end up reading most often are books released by the giant publishing houses based in these two countries. The stories we read, in other words, are the stories they choose to publish -- and publicize. Admittedly, many of them are wonderful, very readable stories, but what we miss out on are books written in another language, or set someplace different, or dealing with something other than magic or adventure -- books that are equally wonderful but which just don't have access to mainstream publishing. And we're left feeling -- wrongly -- that Asian children don't lead lives as exciting as their Western counterparts.
That's what makes Linda Sue Park's "A Single Shard" so refreshing. It's set in 12th-century Korea, in the coastal village of Ch'ulp'o. At that time, Ch'ulp'o was renowned for its ceramics, first because of its easy access to the Yellow Sea and to thriving trade routes with China, and second, because the clay from the village had just the right amount of iron content to produce the exquisite gray-green color known as celadon, so prized by collectors.