Introducing Barefoot Book's Young Fiction! Little Leap Forward

from Barefoot Books:

“Wouldn’t you rather be free, just for a day,
than spend a lifetime in a cage?”

It’s the summer of 1966 and Mao Zedong’s communist regime is about to move to a new level. Little Leap Forward lives in Beijing, with his mother, brother, and four older sisters. When he is not running errands or attending school, he loves to play the flute and to fly kites. One day, Little Leap Forward and his best friend capture a small yellow bird. Little Leap Forward wants her to accompany him on his flute – but behind the bars of her bamboo cage, she is not happy. What will he do – persist with his experiment or set her free?

In a year when China is banning the sale of wild songbirds, ending a 2,000 year history of selling and trading caged thrushes, this story of a young boy learning about freedom of spirit is all the more timely. Little Leap Forward’s touching story is based on author Guo Yue’s boyhood experiences of the Cultural Revolution in China. Sensitive, authoritative and deceptively simple, it offers young readers many intimate and powerful insights into one child’s life and dreams as the Cultural Revolution tightens its grip. As China modernizes and prepares to host the 2008 Olympic Games, interest in this superpower and in the rapidly changing lives of its people is escalating. The games in Beijing this August will bring half a million international and 2.5 million domestic spectators to a newly sanitized city.

THE STORY:

• Video-based e-campaign; national media campaign; author tour timed to coincide with the Beijing Summer Olympics 2008.
• Launch title for Barefoot Books’ new Young Fiction list, perfect for young readers ages 9 -12.
• Looks at close friendship and at the conflict between political change and personal freedom.
• Afterword offers simple historical notes on the Cultural Revolution and talks about what it meant for the author, his family and the Chinese people.
• Gorgeous full color illustrations throughout.

THE CREATORS:

GUO YUE is well known in the music world for the soaring beauty of his bamboo flute playing and compositions. He has performed and recorded worldwide, creating sounds which, in the words of one film director, ‘haunt the soul’. Yue and his wife, Clare Farrow, are also the authors of an adult memoir, Music, Food and Love.

CLARE FARROW is a writer and journalist specializing in modern contemporary art. She and Yue have two young children and live in Richmond, London.

HELEN CANN enjoys using patterns in her artwork and she has a large collection of reference material from around the world, taken from textiles, ceramics, furniture, jewelry— even body paint.

Little Leap Forward is scheduled to release in mid-July!
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