Nancy Traversy, Co-founder and CEO Of Barefoot Books will be honored with Raising A Reader MA’s “Red Bag Award for Family Literacy” at “Celebrating Reading, Family-Style,” our November 15th celebration of Massachusetts Family Literacy Month at the Boston Harbor Hotel. (You can buy tickets online if you would like to join us for this event.) During this event we will ask our guests to share one of their fond family reading memories with each other.  In anticipation of this event, we asked Ms. Traversy to share a fond family reading memory here in Donna’s Book Bag.

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My children are now a little too grown up for bedtime stories (well I don’t think so but they do!), but I have very many fond memories of our family story times.  While we had lots of wonderful stories that we read and re-read together, there was one in particular that has stuck in my mind as a favourite that we pulled out most evenings and all the kids loved. It was an odd little book called “The Green Banana Hunt” with funny pictures; I can’t remember too clearly but I think it was submitted to Barefoot for possible publication as it was out of print and it ended up as part of our rather diverse and quirky family library.

The story was set somewhere in East London and was about a little girl, Kavita, who is sent out by her dad to find green bananas to make some extra special soup for her mom who has just had a new baby.  The green bananas promised to make the soup “as rich and spicy as hot savoury pancakes and as warm as the bright Caribbean sea.” Kavita ends up trading everything from yellow bananas to melons to sweet potatoes, carrots and grapes but the green bananas elude her and she nearly gives up hope. It all works out in the end though, and the story has a lovely, warm message about caring, sharing, family and community.

We always played a funny game as I read the story when I would change the color of the bananas to purple, orange, pink, red and blue, everything but green, and see if the kids would notice. I also did my best to put on a Caribbean accent (not very successfully I might add!), at the end when Kavita watches the green bananas “bob up and down in the soup, swimming against the yam, sweet potatoes, carrots, cho cho, black eyed peas, oxtail and dumplings.”  We laughed a lot and the children never tired of our same silly, but very special, game.

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Please join us in honoring Nancy Traversy and her pioneering work in children’s literature at “Celebrating Reading, Family-Style” on Thursday, November 15th starting at 9:00 AM at the Boston Harbor Hotel.