Bibliographic record
Abstract
Weston, Robert Paul. Illus. Misa Saburi. Sakura’s Cherry Blossoms. Tundra Books, 2018.Sakura, a little girl whose name means “cherry blossom”, shares picnics and stories with her grandmother under the cherry blossom tree near their home in Japan. When Sakura and her mother and father immigrate to North America while her grandmother remains in Japan, the little girl deals with the challenges of adjusting to life in a new country and grieving when her grandmother dies. As the seasons change and spring returns, Sakura comes to understand her grandmother’s wisdom about the importance of friendship. Themes of intergenerational relationships, mourning the loss of a family member, cross-cultural friendships, and the healing power of time all are represented in this book.Author Robert Paul Weston uses a poetry approach to storytelling, a call-back one of his earlier books, Zorgamazoo. This time, the author presents Sakura’s Cherry Blossoms as a series of Tanka, a traditional Japanese non-rhyming form of poetry whose spare and brief structure is well-suited to depicting each event in the story. Weston includes an explanation of Tanka at the end of the book and encourages young readers to create their own poems following this format.The text and illustrations introduce readers to linguistic and cultural aspects of Japan, including traditional foods, clothing, games, and names. It captures the sense of loneliness, disconnection and culture shock people can experience in a new environment, and gently depicts the gradual healing process, culminating in Sakura blossoming with renewed energy, wisdom, and happiness.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Maria TanMaria is a health sciences librarian at the University of Alberta and a former editorial team member of the Deakin Review. She is the co-author, with Sandy Campbell, of A Selective Collection of Children’s Health Fiction 2014 – 2016, described in the Volume 6 (3) issue of the Deakin Review.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.048 | 0.035 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".