Strega Nona

Strega Nona
by Tomie dePaola

Synopsis:

Strega Nona is a wise old woman with unexplained magical powers. Of her many powers, one is the ability to make pasta appear out of thin air by casting a magic spell over her special pasta pot. In Nona's old age she decides to take on a helper to clean the house and tend the garden. Big Anthony gets the job and starts his duties right away. One day while Nona is performing the spell over her pot, Big Anthony secretly looks-on and sees for himself how to make the pot overflow with pasta. Anthony waits for his chance, and when Strega Nona ventures out to visit a friend in a nearby village he jumps at his chance to use the pot. But to Anthony's surprise when he uses the spell over the pot he cannot get the pasta to stop flowing! He must hold out hope for the return of Strega Nona or be buried in a sea of pasta!

Response:

After reading through Jamie O'Rourke I chose this book to read because of the similar illustrations, not realizing that both were written by Tomie dePaola. After I read Strega Nona I was interested in finding out what other books dePaola had written. As it turns out dePaola has written many books, and many of them are influenced by different cultures and their traditions.

It seemed to me, that after reading Jamie O'Rourke, Strega Nona, and some of his other books: Big Anthony: His Story and The Legend of Indian Paintbrush, that dePaola paints a pretty vague, stereotyped picture of the cultures he describes in his stories. It's not to say that the writing negatively portrays the people and cultures it uses, but the stories are based off really general, surface level descriptions of culture.

If I used these books in a classroom it would definitely not be as part of a look into the cultures of the people he represents in his books. They seem to centered around stereotyped ideas about how people from certain times and places acted. Though I don't believe dePaola meant to create pigeonholed depictions of these various cultures, he definitely succeeded in reinforcing some widely held stereotypes about specific cultures and peoples.

Book Link Activity:

The picture book Strega Nona links to Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato through the author Tomie dePaola, as he wrote both books. This central tie between the two books makes them a good choice for an author study or for a Questioning the Author discussion activity.

For an author study I would include Strega Nona and Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato with some of his other books (Big Anthony: His Story; The Legend of Indian Paintbrush) to study how an author's style and voice can be seen across their different works. In dePaola's work he likes to use old folk tales, and work cultural traditions and myths into his story telling. Through reading and re-reading students would identify common language, story structure, and themes that make the books unique to the author's style of writing.

For a Question the Author discussion, students would take the knowledge that dePaola wrote both stories and try to find out how both stories display his idea's and biases about the myths he is retelling. Students would analyze his use of dialect and the stereotyped cultural traditions and roles he uses to tell his stories. Questions to guide the discussion activity would be:

• How does dePaola describe/depict specific cultures in his writing? (What character names does he use? Settings? Cultural foods? Roles/traditions?)
• Can you (students) relate to any of the cultures he depicts in his writing? (What does he depict accurately? Does he miss anything? Does he include anything that is not typical of the specific culture?)
• What do his representations say about how he views these cultures/peoples? (Did he research these cultures? Write from his own experience? How did he get the information to write his stories?)
• How would you write a fairy tale about your own culture? (Would it sound like dePaola's? Different? In what ways?)