Thanksgiving at Obaachan's

In this title, as in Jama Kim Rattigan's Dumpling Soup (1993), an Asian American girl describes how her family uniquely celebrates a holiday. The narrator, who is Japanese American, begins promisingly: ``I stepped onto the dusty driveway as soon as our car stopped and headed straight for the sounds of laughter and familiar smells.'' Within, the girl describes Obaachan's (Grandmother's) Japanese-style house (``I saw her butsudan''--and the reader can identify the object in the illustration when told that ``the photograph of my late Ojiichan is in front of it''). The Thanksgiving table offers up turkey along with tsukemono; and Obaachan and her granddaughter readily surmount the language barrier. But Brown's loose, occasionally crude watercolors lack luster, and she fumbles in the text as well (would a child say ``I gazed at the familiar flowered pattern embossed on her cotton dress''?). Production values, too, are muddled: ``I put five of then on my fingers,'' reads a phrase in the finished book. Ages 3-8. (May)