Tricky Chopsticks by Sylvia Chen

Hey, Story Seekers! Have you ever watched everybody else do something that looks ridiculously easy, tried it yourself, and thought:

How are they DOING that?

Welcome to Jenny Chow's problem.

Tricky Chopsticks, written by Sylvia Chen and illustrated by Fanny Liem, follows a young Chinese American girl who cannot get the hang of chopsticks. That's inconvenient at dinner. It's downright alarming when your family has an annual Chopsticks Challenge coming up.

Thirty years of reading out loud to rooms full of kids is the only qualification that matters here, and Readit has already decided that a contest involving dumplings sounds like an excellent use of everybody's time.

I can't really argue with him.

Book Breakdown

Jenny Chow has a problem that keeps following her right to the dinner table.

Chopsticks.

Slippery. Wobbly. Uncooperative chopsticks.

Everybody around Jenny seems to know how to use them. Meanwhile, Jenny fumbles food, gets embarrassed, and worries about the family's annual chopsticks challenge at her cousin Victor's birthday party.

She does not want to be the only Chow who never learns.

So she starts experimenting.

And this is where Sylvia Chen takes what could have been a simple "practice until you get better" story and gives Jenny something more interesting to do. Jenny looks at the problem. She tries different ideas. Some don't work. Then she notices that tongs are easier to control because the two sides are connected.

Hmm.

Now we've got something.

Jenny combines that observation with her origami skills and starts working on a way to modify her chopsticks. She experiments with an origami star to hold the two sticks apart, adjusts where it sits, practices, and keeps tinkering until she's found a method that works for her.

I like that.

Jenny doesn't suddenly become good at chopsticks because she believes hard enough. She thinks. She builds. She tests. She fails. She changes something.

Then she tries again.

Chen has plenty of fun with the failures, too. Food goes flying, and the book is loaded with wonderfully noisy sound words. Some appear in both English and Chinese characters, which gives the read-aloud a lot more life than a quiet little story about table manners would have had.

Fanny Liem gets to enjoy the mess.

Her bright cartoon-style illustrations make Jenny's frustration easy to read on her face and in her whole body. When the chopstick experiments go wrong, Liem doesn't politely keep the food where food belongs. Things splatter. Things fly. Jenny's attempts have movement, and the pictures help turn trial and error into comedy.

For teachers and librarians: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, March 19, 2024. Forty pages, ages 4 to 8. Sylvia Chen's debut picture book. Instructions for making your own chopstick tongs are printed at the back.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

There's a moment in learning something new when the thing you're trying to learn stops being the real problem.

Everybody else can do it.

That's the problem.

Jenny isn't simply frustrated with two sticks. She's embarrassed. Her family can use chopsticks. A waiter takes one look at her and brings a fork for her dim sum.

Ouch.

Kids know that feeling.

Maybe it isn't chopsticks. Maybe everybody else can tie their shoes, ride a bike, swim across the pool, read the hard word, hit the ball, or whistle through their teeth.

Once a kid starts thinking, "Everybody can do this except me," the whole thing gets heavier.

That's why I'm glad Chen lets Jenny solve the problem her own way.

She doesn't need somebody standing over her chanting, "Try harder!" She needs room to fool around with the problem until she sees it differently.

There's some real STEAM thinking happening there, but I wouldn't stop the story and announce it to the kids. Let Jenny do the work. They'll see it.

I also think this one has strong read-aloud bones.

Those sound effects are sitting there begging for a voice, and the failed experiments give you natural spots to pause before the next mess happens. With kids, anticipation can be as much fun as the splat.

You know something is about to go wrong.

They know something is about to go wrong.

Jenny may be the only person in the room who doesn't know yet.

Turn the page.

One more thing I appreciate. Jenny's solution isn't magic. Kids can actually make a version of her chopstick tongs themselves, and the instructions are right there at the back of the book.

Now the story has escaped.

I like books that do that.

Readit's Review

Okay, first of all, I would practice with something that does NOT make a giant mess when I drop it.

Maybe marshmallows.

Actually, definitely marshmallows.

Jenny keeps trying different ways to make the chopsticks work, and I liked guessing whether each one was going to work.

Most of the time I thought:

Nope.

I also like the star.

If everybody says you have to use two sticks, and you figure out how to put something between the sticks that makes them easier to use, I don't think that's cheating.

I think that's inventing.

And I want to make the chopstick tongs from the back of the book.

But I am not practicing with noodles first.

I have learned from Jenny.

What Others Think

This is one of those nice cases where the professional reviewers and the families noticed the same things.

Kirkus went straight at the noise and the slapstick, calling Chen's onomatopoeia, "represented in both English and Mandarin characters," a perfect conveyance of Jenny's frustrations, and praising Liem's cartoon illustrations for capturing "Jenny's experiments in chopstick re-engineering with slapstick humor and cleverness." Their verdict: "A funny, relatable tale about the value of creative thinking and persistence."

On Goodreads the book sits at 4.28 out of 5 from 345 ratings, with 126 written reviews. Readers keep landing on the same handful of things. One reader, Carrie Finison, put the appeal simply: "Kids will root for Jenny as she tries everything she can think of to manipulate her chopsticks, but to no avail." Another, Stephanie Lucianovic, aimed it straight at the grown-ups: "Great for teachers/parents/caregivers looking to showcase growth mindsets and creative problem solving." And reader Steena Hernandez flagged the part kids actually care about: "A detailed guide on how to make your own non-tricky chopsticks is included at the end."

Karen Yingling, reviewing for YA Books Central, made a point worth repeating for anybody buying this for a classroom. The type is a good size for reading aloud, and the book also works for a young reader who wants to take it on alone. That combination is rarer than it sounds.

Laura Frantz, a collection development librarian with the Somerset County Library System in New Jersey, called it a joyful picture book about perseverance and pointed to it for STEAM projects. Changing Hands Bookstore in Arizona put it more plainly than anybody: "An enjoyable story of perseverance, ingenuity, and dim sum."

Here's my favorite thing I turned up, though. Seattle's Child reports that Chen "remembers her mom challenging her to pick up wet marbles with chopsticks."

Wet marbles.

Readit, you were right about the marshmallows.

Belly Laugh Scale

3 out of 5: Solid Chuckles

There's plenty of funny here, especially when Jenny's experiments send food where food was never intended to go.

The sound effects help. Liem's expressions help even more. And reading those noises aloud with a little commitment should bump the laughter up another notch.

But I'm keeping this at a 3 because comedy isn't running the whole show.

Jenny is.

The laughs make her struggle fun to follow, but we're really sticking around to see whether she can outthink those two stubborn sticks.

Final Explorer Verdict

I'd hand Tricky Chopsticks to kids ages 4 to 8, especially children who get frustrated when they can't master something as quickly as everybody else.

It's also a strong classroom read-aloud for persistence, creative problem solving, STEAM activities, family traditions, or simply starting a conversation about the different ways people eat and the skills we sometimes take for granted.

And definitely use the sound effects.

Come on.

If a book gives you permission to make flying-food noises in front of a room full of kids, you take it.

Jenny starts out trying to master her chopsticks. I think the better part is that she figures out how to tackle a problem.

That's a skill that'll work long after the dumplings are gone.

If the build-it-test-it-watch-it-collapse part is what hooks your kid, that's the same engine I put in Fort Night, my silly STEM book about blanket forts that fall down until they don't. It isn't out yet, but it's up for preorder.

Keep experimenting, Story Seekers.

Jungle Jimmy & Readit