A History of the Romani People (review)

The Romani, often colloquially known as Gypsies, may have a long history in the world, but they're rarely chronicled factually in children's literature. Kyuchukov and Hancock, the latter Romani ambassador to the United Nations and Romani representative on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, attempt to fill this gap with an overview of Romani history, language, traditions, and customs. Topics such as "Wagons," "Occupations," "Hardships," and "Life Today" receive a spread or two each, with compact text partnering with photographs and the occasional sidebar. There's useful information here—many young people will be unaware of the existence of contemporary Romanies, let alone their practices and beliefs—and the book gains intimacy from the author's self-identification and frequent use of the first-person plural ("Some of us have become well known as influential jazz musicians"). However, the writing is sometimes flat, the organization is fairly random, and much of the material here is vague or muddled, needing background knowledge or further explanation: Is there any connection between the name of the Romani and the country of Romania, where many of them live? If school presents Romani children with the difficulty of working in a second language, where is it that "Romanies most often use [the Romani dialect] Vlax in the classroom"? Where are the "some places" that force Romanies to live "with curfews in walled ghettos"? Photograph captions often fail to include identifying information about time or place, making it hard to distinguish past lifestyles from current; diagrams are confusingly notated and some key maps lack country names. This could, though, be a starting place for exploration of the subject, as long as other materials are provided to flesh out the picture. An index is included.