A little girl, Rubina, is invited to her first ever birthday party while living in America, and she complains that her mother doesn’t know how birthday parties work. Her mother insists that she bring along her younger sister, Sana, and no matter how much Rubina cries and pleas, she winds up bringing along her younger sister. For this reason, she says she doesn’t get invited to birthday parties for a long time. Fast forwarding, years later, Sana gets invited to her first birthday party and their mother once again explains that she can’t go without bringing Rubina, and her younger sister Maryam. Ultimately, Rubina convinces her mom to let Sana go to the party by herself, saving her sister from the embarrassment, and to make up for it, Sana brings Rubina home a lollipop, because …show more content…
The supporting characters are portrayed as various different races and her illustrations of the family don’t show any specific racism or stereotypical images, unless one considers the picture of the mother in a hijab stereotypical considering not all Muslim woman wear the hijab.
Rubina refers to her mother as Ami, meaning mother in Arabic. Each characters’ name is also from Arabic decent like: Rubina, Sana, and Maryam. As for the clothes displayed on the characters, all of the girls dress as any American girl would dress, but the mother is pictured in Muslim styled clothes including the hijab she wears on her head. In which I believe all of these cultural depictions to be accurate.
Seto would love Big Red Lollipop because it is a story that the author, Khan, has experienced first hand as a child even though she was the annoying little sister. Woodson would absolutely love this book because it is the author’s own story and experiences! As for Gates, he would especially enjoy reading this picture book because Khan was telling her own story, which is enough research to be