“Too Many Tamales,” was written by Gary Soto and illustrated
by Ed Martinez. It entails a story of a girl named Maria who helps her mom make
Tamales. While her mom steps away from the kitchen for a moment, Maria sneaks
and tries on her mother’s ring. When her mother returns, she quickly goes back
to kneading the masa. Maria later becomes frazzled when she realizes that her mother’s
ring is missing! After eating all the tamales in search of the ring, Maria
learns that her mother had the ring all along. The genre of this book would
have to be contemporary realistic fiction. Typical characteristics of realistic
fiction is a story plot that could happen in real life with realistic
characters. Also, another characteristic of this genre takes place in a modern
time. “Too Many Tamales” fits into this genre because Maria and all the other
characters are definitely ones that could exist outside of the story. The book
also, has a real-life problem (the possibility of the ring being loss) that she
is trying to solve. Finally, there is no magic or fantasy in the story line. The
illustrations in this book contains illustrations that use paint and pastel art
to illustrate this story with dark colors and thick lines. The dark colors show
the intensity of the book and the weariness in the story. The illustrations throughout the book cover in
the entire page, and are predictable to add to story plot and help the readers
with a better interpretation. The theme in the literature is that telling the
truth always surpasses a lie because eventually the truth will be known. The setting
in the story takes place during Christmas in a Mexican household. The setting
is great because it incorporates different culture that is mixed with Mexican
culture (making the tamales) and American tradition (Christmas tree). The plot of this story is centralized around Maria
helping her mother with the Tamales, to her mother’s missing ring and the
search for it, and ends Maria telling the truth and finding out that everything
is still okay. A good activity that could be used with the book is having the
readers to write a reflection about the different ways the story could have
played out if Maria had decided not to the tell the truth. This could help them
to understand that telling a lie is not a good thing, and that there can be
many bad outcomes that come with telling a lie. Another activity that could be
used with this book is have all the readers discuss with their peers something
that they learned from the book, whether it be about the Mexican culture, the
theme, or anything else that they took away from the book. Since this is a multicultural
book, it is good to have children discuss the differences in the book so they
are able to reflect on them and gain a learning experience. Good reader
response question for this book would be; Explain a time in which you were in a
situation like Maria where you had to choose between telling the truth or a
lie? What did you do and why? Another good reader response question for this
book would be; If you were the author, would you write the story in a different
way? Why or why not? These questions will help the readers think about the
literature in a different way, and help them personally connect to what they
have read in the text. This book overall is a great book for children to read.
It teaches them in a subtle way that honesty is appreciated and that you should
want to tell the truth mainly based off of the fact that it is the right thing
to do.
Cullian, B., Galda, L., Sipe, L. (2010).
Literature and the child. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Martinez, E., Soto, G. (1993). Too many tamales. New York, NY: Putnam
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