Love as Strong as Ginger

Katie loves to show her grandma how to dress a Barbie…and GninGnin loves to show Katie how to make rice dumplings. More than anything, Katie longs to go with GninGnin to work, to crack a mountain of crabs alongside her at the crab cannery.

One day Katie gets her wish, but nothing is the way she’d imagined it. GninGnin swings a heavy mallet from sunup to sundown in a noisy, smelly room, earning barely enough for bus fare and a fish for dinner. That evening, when Katie eats the delicious meal that GninGnin has cooked – made with love as strong as ginger and dreams as thick as black-bean paste – she has a new understanding of her beloved grandma’s hard life, and the sacrifices she’s made to give her granddaughter a brighter future.

All the poignancy of Lenore Look’s beautifully realized story – based on her own childhood memories of her Chinese immigrant grandmother – is captured in Caldecott Honor Medalist Stephen T. Johnson’s sensitive, expressive pastels.