Tag Marianne Ferrer

Brown Girl in the Snow

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Brown Girl in the Snow
Yolanda T. Marshall and Marianne Ferrer
Greystone Kids

Amina, the narrator of the story has recently moved from the Caribbean where she was able to grown all kinds of plants, to a snowy city in a new country, and she’s not happy.

“There’s a brown girl in the
Tra la la la la,
where none of her plants will grow”


She sings as she watches the other children playing, then asks her elder brother how she can grown her garden in such an environment. He suggests she should wait for the spring to come. Hearing her song, her dad takes her to the library where she discovers a book about gardens. This cheers her somewhat and the following day her teacher asks why she’s not out playing with the other children. Having heard how Amina misses growing plants, she has an idea:

she sets up a class field trip to a greenhouse. When her classmates her about this, some of them start talking about the plants they are missing from their home countries such as The Republic of Congo and India. They also ask Amina to join them in their play outside next time. The weeks pass and at last it’s the field trip. Amina is a bit disappointed that she doesn’t see sweet potatoes growing in the greenhouse though there are lots of other tropical plants; nonetheless the trip is a success. Particularly when Mr Lokon discovers that she was hoping to find sweet potatoes and gives her some slips to plant.

He also invites her and her new friends to return and watch their growth. This they do though it takes a long time and in the meantime, Amina becomes much more positive about her new home.

The refrain, “There’s a brown girl …” is repeated several times throughout the story, with different ending lines as events progress and young listeners will enjoy joining in each time. Aptly Marianne Ferrer’s stylised watercolour depictions of the plants and some clothing items are in various green hues, with a dark magenta for Amina’s sweet potatoes.

The author draws on her own experience for this story: it’s ideal for children who are moving to a different climate and those who feel homesick for a previous country as well as for a KS1 topic related to growing plants.

A Story about Cancer (with a Happy Ending)

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A Story about Cancer (with a Happy Ending)
India Desjardins and Marianne Ferrer (trans. Solange Ouellet)
Frances Lincoln Children’s Books

The story opens with the 15-year-old narrator telling us, as she and her parents walk down the hospital corridor, “In just a few minutes, they’re going to tell me how much time I have left to live.”

It’s five years since she was diagnosed with leukaemia and as she awaits her prognosis she shares with readers her years of treatment with the threat of death hanging over her. We hear of the sadness she feels over the death of her best friend Maxine which was “definitely not because she wasn’t strong enough or didn’t fight hard enough”; and are shown how her grief renders her temporarily limp limbed.

She talks of the hospital sounds, smells and colour scheme, how her parents react to her illness – her father’s jokes;

her mother’s insistence “that she had so much confidence in me, and she knew I’d get well …’ in contrast to her own it isn’t ‘ a battle…because there was nothing I could do to fight it. All I could do was let everything happen to me and try not to complain too much.”

There are high points too: she goes to a party, meets Victor and experiences her first love.

And finally, as we know from the title, the news the doctor gives is good; the narrator is going to live.

This no-holds-barred story is a real emotional roller coaster but the first person telling serves to bring a sense of calm to the whole sequence of events, be they dark or bright. Ferrer’s almost dreamlike, at times, surreal visuals, highlight the intensity of feeling, moving from predominantly grey to plum and claret when ardour prevails.

The author was asked by a ten year old cancer patient she met on a hospital visit to write a cancer story that ends happily. This is the result and serves to remind readers that 8 out of 10 children diagnosed with cancer are cured, and to give hope to any child who has cancer.