The Caldecott award winners - indeed, picture books in general - often seem to float in a gentle timeless world untouched by history, or at least only brushed by the brighter and more beautiful parts of it. It's a peaceful place, picture book land, a pleasant respite.

This is not true of the 1995 Caldecott winner, Smoky Night, which was inspired by the Los Angeles riots in 1992 (although the riot within the book has no specific location). The two year turnaround time (Caldecott winners are selected from the books published the year before the award is given) makes the riots a red hot topical reference in picture book terms.

It's, well, it's a very 90s take on race relations. If only we all get to know each other, maybe we can all get along! Well, maybe. This seems a little too pat to me - it all ties up too neatly with a bow at the end.

On the other hand, it may be asking too much to expect a picture book to explain systemic racism to five-year-olds.

The illustrations are acrylic, thick black outlines filled in with heavy dark colors, and mixed media collages for the backgrounds. It isn't a style I particularly like: there's something upsetting about the teal & purple palette David Diaz used for the faces, although I understand that he probably didn't want to commit to races for all the characters. But the collages are definitely striking (there's one with broken glass; another with crumbled dry cleaner clothes, still in the bags), and quite unlike anything I've seen in other picture books.

”I’ve got another one. Another saying. ‘Planting seeds grows happiness.’”

“C’est vrai.” Grandmere starts rocking again, her lips upturned.

I think but don’t say: Sometimes bad happens.

Sayings come from observing the world. As true as the sun rises and sets, bad is. That’s what I’ve learned.

Oil and salt destroy land. A bird’s wing gets broken. A turtle gets eaten by a gator.

Mami Wata couldn’t stop Membe being captured as a slave.

This quote does not entirely capture Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Bayou Magic - the book is more hopeful than this excerpt really expresses - but it does capture the rhythm and the cadence of the book, the darkness that hangs just beyond the light of the fireflies Maddy’s grandmother teaches her to summon. There is light and beauty and magic in this book, but these things can only hope to hold back the badness, to make it bearable, not to defeat it.

I was curious how Rhodes would combine a “girl meets magic” storyline with African-American history without either getting losing the wish-fulfillment aspects that make this sort of story fun, or else getting too wish-fulfillment-y which would require straight-up ignoring the ugly parts of history. In fact, she finds an excellent balance between the two - with room to spare for beautiful passages about the bayou and the mermaids, which both seem to get more magical through their association with each other.

This is the third book in a series (I’m not sure how tightly connected the series is; they might just be connected by the premise, “African-American heroines in Louisiana + magic”), and now I want to go back and read the first two.

I liked Shaun Walker’s The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past, but in a mild sort of way: I finished it over a week ago and it’s already fading out of my mind.

Two things that stuck with me. First, there’s a part where Walker is talking about Chechnya, and comments in amazement on the number of Chechens who serve in the Russian armed forced - even though Stalin deported the entire Chechen nation during World War II, even though Russia has leveled Grozny twice since the end of the Soviet Union.

When you put it that way it does sound surprising. But then, Native Americans serve in the US military in high numbers (I just learned this in Onigamiising), despite having a similarly harrowing history with that institution - and it struck me that perhaps these things seems baffling only if you look at them from a certain angle, if you assume that joining the military is a reflection of burning patriotism or at least some enthusiasm for a country, when really sometimes it’s just a job, an opportunity, maybe the only opportunity for someone living in a marginalized community.

No one thinks you have to have a burning love of McDonalds to start flipping burgers, after all.

The other thing that struck me is the total failure of empathy in the West vis-a-vis the collapse of the Soviet Union. My impression is that the American assumption was that everyone in the USSR would react about the same way as, say, Poland, where the Soviets were viewed as an invading power and their withdrawal caused celebration.

But outside of eastern Europe (which only came into the Soviet sphere post-World War II in any case), most people didn’t see it that way: they saw their own government and way of life collapsing, national purpose and identity crushed, with nothing to replace it but a kleptocratic oligarchy, and meanwhile the West looked on in bafflement and said “You’ve got democracy now! Why aren’t you rejoicing?”

I finished Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and have since been forced by bitter exigencies (well, work) to put off reading the fourth Neapolitan novel - AGONY! Although I decided that this agony would be much better than the agony of being forced to read it in driblets around work, so really I have no one to blame but myself.

The third book ends ( Spoilers for everything so far )

I quite enjoyed Triumph and Disaster, which is a collection of - historical sketches, I guess you could call them, by Stefan Zweig, each on the theme of a great turning point in history and the small "for want of a nail..." details that led events to turn out the way they did.

Waterloo - which Napoleon lost because Marshall Grouchy followed his orders and continued to pursue the Prussians, rather than realize that he must disobey and turn back. The fall of Constantinople - which might have been avoided, except that a postern gate had been forgotten, and left open in the wall. Wilson - giving in to pressure to compromise on a realistic peace treaty, rather than holding firm in his dedication to the Fourteen Points.

I do wonder a bit if this last sketch doesn't suffer from wishful thinking on Zweig's part. He was writing a Jewish writer in interwar Austria, and I think must have yearned achingly for the Treaty of Versailles to turn out differently - for Wilson's dreams of endless peace to come true, rather than World War I slipping ineluctable toward World War II. I am not at all sure I share his belief that Wilson could have created a more lasting peace if he had refused to compromise. Might he not simply have ended up sidelined? The wider structural forces against a lasting peace may simply have been too strong for any one man to overcome.

But even if I don't agree with his historical conclusions - and even in translation, which I know probably mutes his voice - Zweig's writing is beautiful. As Wilson sails away, he says, concluding his sketch, he "will not let his eyes look back on our unfortunate continent, which has been longing for peace and unity for thousands of years and has never achieved it. And once again the eternal vision of a humane world recedes into mist and into the distance."

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Holly Webb’s Return to the Secret Garden, which has a charming premise - evacuee children during World War II sent to Misselthwaite Manor! - and proceeds to use it to make the our beloved Secret Garden characters heirs to all the miseries of history.

No, I did not want to read about Dickon becoming a grumpy old man because during World War I he got facial scarring so severe that children flinch away from him. Nor did I want to read about Colin Craven dying at Dunkirk in World War II. No! The fact that it was a heroic death does not make it better! COLIN CRAVEN IS NEVER SUPPOSED TO DIE, DID YOU NOT EVEN READ THE SECRET GARDEN.

I have never been fond of “major character death” fic and the fact that this is professionally published does not make me like it any better.

What I’m Reading Now

I read a lot of books by women because generally speaking I find them less likely to be misogynistic than books by men. But there’s generally, and then there’s Edna Ferber, whose writing I don’t remember being nearly this soaked in misogynistic tropes in Dawn O’Hara. Maybe she soured as she got older, soured by her life as a ~failed spinster~ - spinsters being, in Ferberville, by definition failures. As are wives if they’re too conventional. And women who sleep around if they sleep around too much.

Pansy Deleath has just gone to the Klondike with a troupe of dancing girls, and Ferber takes every opportunity to remind us how silly they are and how much better and more solid and less slutty Pansy looks by comparison. She may end up being Vaughn Melendy’s mistress for the next fifty years, but that’s because it’s TRUE LOVE, not for base mercenary gold-digging reasons like those ~other girls.

Ugh. I’m going to finish the book because it’s part of the Unread Book Club and I intend to finish them all, but UGH.

In cheerier news - well, cheerier is the wrong word. But in more pleasurable if somewhat soul-destroying reading news, I’ve started Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is beautiful and wonderfully observed (and a good example of how to write a story set in a deeply sexist culture without making the story itself sexist, so TAKE THAT, Edna Ferber) and weirdly engrossing. I meant to do other things yesterday evening and instead gulped down the first half of the book.

What I Plan to Read Next

My reading challenge for September is “a book by an #ownvoices or #diversebooks author.” I was already planning to read Ashley Bryan’s Freedom Over Me, which won a Newbery Honor this year (also, I just looked Bryan up, and he’s 94 years old. Ninety-four and still winning book awards! I find it strangely inspiring), and also Jewell Parker Rhodes Bayou Magic, which looked intriguing when I found it at the used bookstore… although upon looking it up online, it looks like it’s the third in a trilogy, so maybe I ought to start at the beginning?

Upon further inspection, it looks like a rather loosely knit trilogy, so probably I can start with Bayou Magic and go back and read the others if I like it. I was planning to find a third book to make it a hat trick anyway - if I don’t like Bayou Magic enough to want to read the rest of that series, then maybe Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Mighty Miss Malone.

Here's a lovely book I never would have found without Netgalley: Linda LeGarde Grover's Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year, which is a melange of many things: an exploration of Ojibwe (or Anishinaabeg) culture (Grover is a member of the tribe herself), a memoir, a family history, a meditation on how to life a good life - mino-bimaadiziwin - which involves "modesty, respect, thankfulness, generosity, and an awareness of one's ability and obligation to contribute to the well-being of others."

It's even occasionally a cookbook. I bookmarked the recipe for Blueberries and Dumplings. Will report back if I ever make it.

There are echoes of historical trauma in the book - particularly the Indian boarding school era, which lasted from 1879 to 1934, although, as Grover points out, the schools generally didn't close on the dot in 1934. That's just the date when the federal government decided the schools should be shut down, but many lingered on afterward.

Grover's father was sent to a boarding school, and although he didn't talk about it, Grover feels the contrast between his experience and her own memories of going to a regular day school, and sending her own daughters and grandchildren to school confident that they'll come home that night.

But on the whole it is a gentle book. The emphasis on family pleasures and the changing seasons is a relaxing contrast to the generally harrowing news right now.

Oh, and it's got another facet: craft guide. Grover reminisces about ironing autumn leaves between waxed paper (between old dish towels, so the wax didn't melt to the iron) and then hanging the leaves in the window "where the afternoon sun lit them to a stained-glass effect." Doesn't that sound gorgeous? I want to do that too.

I am returned from my eclipsnic! Which is a portmanteau of eclipse + picnic, and involved eclipse cookies (chocolate cookies with white chips really, but "eclipse cookies" sounds better. I may change the name permanently in my brain), and pop rocks Oreos, and little individually sized bottles of champagne that Becky brought. We had a lovely time!

We did not have eclipse glasses, but Julie made us eclipse boxes which worked quite well enough, and also a woman stopped by the park halfway through the eclipse and called out, "Want to look through this welding helmet?"

So of course we did and it was splendid and none of us have gone blind, so that seems to have gone well enough.

The park came equipped with a Little Free Library (I would like to say this was serendipity, but in fact I looked into it before), which I raided - with great success! for I found Mary Downing Hahn’s Stepping on the Cracks. I liked Hahn's ghost stories when I was a kid. This one doesn’t look like it has any ghosts, but it’s about two best friends on the American homefront during World War II, which seems Relevant to My Interests.

And in return, I left The Railway Children, which I found in a Little Free Library in Ann Arbor. So it will continue to wend its way through the libraries of the world, like a ship upon the waves.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Barbara Pym’s Some Tame Gazelle, which is rather in the same vein as D. E. Stevenson’s Miss Buncle’s Book, although less funny. Which I guess means it isn’t in quite the same vein after all, really. They both write about spinsters and quiet English country villages, but Stevenson is writing comedy and Pym has, to my mind, a slightly tragic vein to it: all these people living their quiet faintly claustrophobic lives where nothing ever changes and no one seems particularly happy, although they are perhaps contented with their discontent, if you will.

Possibly it’s meant to be funny. Certainly there’s some humor to the ironic bits where Belinda says something like “one didn’t want to be snobbish, but - ” followed inevitably by something quite snobbish. But the limitations of their lives, not just the outward limitations of circumstance but the inward limitations of timidity, or lack of education (Belinda thinks a number of times about her lack of a classical education), or simply lack of cleverness - anyway it all seemed faintly sad to me.

I also finished A Bride for Anna’s Papa, which is pretty mediocre, unfortunately. Anna has mixed feelings about her father’s new bride, which sounds interesting but never gathers much emotional force - and then bam, it’s the last chapter and there’s a big fire and suddenly Anna is reconciled to the fact that the bride is part of the family now. I realize that disasters can have this epiphany-forcing effect, but I would have liked some kind of emotional arc leading up to it.

What I’m Reading Now

The Motor Girls at Crystal Bay, which was published in 1914 and ne’er, so far as I can tell, saw the hand of an editor. The author keeps fumbling which characters are speaking to each other in a conversation. Oh dear. Why did you keep this one, my great-great-aunts?

And I have nearly finished From Billabong to London - which, coincidentally, was also published in 1914. As I write, the Billabong crew have just been stopped on the HIGH SEAS by a GERMAN WARSHIP, and Jim and Wally are about to be taken prisoner for their part in arresting a German spy. Will rescue arrive before the Germans drag them away into the darkness???

The next book is called Jim and Wally, so nothing too fatal can befall them, although I suppose it could concern Jim and Wally’s daring escape from a German prison camp. But really I think they are going to be saved in the nick of time by a dashing British destroyer.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Disaster Artist! The library came through for me and I am PRETTY EXCITED.

Ed Young's Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story from China won the Caldecott medal when I was young, so it was everywhere in my early years, and it terrified me. Not the story, mind you, I never got to that part - but the cover: all in red, except for the shadowy black wolf with its terrible hypnotic white eyes.

It's probably just as well I never read it, even though the art style is beautiful, because many of the illustrations have that same terrifying effect. Like the bit where the three girls let the wolf into the house, because the wolf has convinced them that he's their grandmother, and the picture is simply the vast black shadow of a wolf splashed across the top of the page with the three girls looking tiny underneath...

I've heard a number of variations on the Red Riding Hood story, and in my recollection Red escapes in the end in all of them - but the illustrations created such a sense of menace that I began to worry this story would buck the trend. Especially as there are three sisters. Doubtless the wolf would be vanquished in the end, but he might still eat one of the sisters first.

(I hope you will not consider it a hopeless spoiler if I reassure you that he doesn't. In fact the sisters defeat him all on their own, no woodcutter in sight to help.)

And the illustrations truly are gorgeous. They never become wholly abstract, but there's definitely something expressionistic about them: lots of intense close-ups on the wolf's face, broad washes of color for the sky or the trees.

The first picture, which shows the mother leaving home to visit the actual grandmother - beneath a golden wash of dawn, with pale purple clouds above, and the ground still black with night, except for the golden gingko tree nestled against the house - well, that's just lovely. And there's a similarly lovely picture at the end of the book, bookending the story to show that peace has been restored.