Volume 4, No. 25: Cats, Mice, Vegetables, & Names

mini reviews of picture books

Greetings, book and treat people! It’s been so hot. I’ve been swimming in the early mornings before retreating to my cave. Folks keep sending me memes about how awful summer is. I appreciate this. And it’s really hot.

Before we get into today’s newsletter, some housekeeping: I am not going to be able to follow through with the Bookshop.org giveaway I announced a few weeks ago. I’m sorry. I know this is bad form. I thought a raffle for a fun prize might be the nudge folks needed to go ahead and finally subscribe. It was not. So few people subscribed during the giveaway that every time I thought about spending $60 on prizes, I started to panic. I have been agonizing over this for days, until I realized that, in the scheme of bad things people can do, backing out of a giveaway hardly registers.

It’s still embarrassing to admit. It’s embarrassing to admit that I haven’t even been able to reach 100 paid subscriptions since making the announcement back in May that Books & Bakes will not continue unless I’m fairly paid for the work I put into it. It’s embarrassing to admit how much I’ve been struggling to write the newsletter each week, knowing how few people are reading it. I suspect these are all things I shouldn’t be admitting, but at this point I’m not sure it matters what I say.

I know most of you are here for books, so let’s talk books!

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My reading is all over the place. I’ve been scrolling through book reflections for the past hour, trying to find the motivation to edit and share them. I made a list of 15 of the best books I’ve read this year for Queer Your Year, but I don’t have the energy to write even a sentence about each one. But I have been reading and writing about picture books. Picture books are the best part of my reading life right now. They are pure joy. So here are reviews of a few I’ve especially loved in the past few weeks.

John Yeoman (words) & Quentin Blake (art): Mouse Trouble (1972)

This book is perfect. I am in love. I know all about mouse trouble, and the mice in this book are just so…mousey. It’s a silly book about all these mice who live in an old mill owned by a mean, grumpy man. He wants to get rid of the mice so he gets a cat, but he is so mean to the cat that the mice start to feel bad, and eventually befriend it.

It’s a total delight, I was cackling, but the thing about it is that even though it’s this silly, fantastical story about mice…they are just so like mice! The hoards of them, the way they hop around and look at each other and nibble on things, their general attitude, how they dance around and make noise and slip into crevices…I just was profoundly aware of how well this book captures the nature of mice, even while anthropomorphizing them. The art is fantastic.

Also, this just such a good story: it’s funny, it’s satisfying, it’s surprising, there’s tension, there’s a whole character arc and growth (the cat and the mice, not the grumpy man). And there is one illustration with all the mice lined up behind the grumpy mill dude while he doesn’t know it that is just so perfect, it will live in my brain rent free forever.

Grace Lin: The Ugly Vegetables (1999)

What an immensely lovey and satisfying book. A girl is excited to help her mother plant their backyard garden. But she can’t help noticing that their garden is very different from those of all their neighbors. Everyone else is growing flowers. They are growing ugly, ugly vegetables. Her mother patiently answers all her questions about why their garden looks the way it does, telling her that they are growing Chinese vegetables, and that, just wait, they’re better than flowers. The little girl is not convinced, not even when she helps her mom harvest a whole wheelbarrow full of bumpy, funny-looking veggies. But then her mom makes the best soup she’s ever tasted—and everyone else agrees.

This is a delightful book. The art is bright and whimsical. The drawings of the gardens, especially, aren’t realistic; instead they capture the essence of what’s growing in them. I love this mother for patiently doing her thing—growing the vegetables she loves and gently telling her daughter: this is our culture and heritage, this is important, these vegetables are really special, over and over again, but without heat, until the daughter cares about the garden as much as she does. It’s such a quiet and specific love letter.

David Robertson (words) & Julie Flett (art): On the Trapline (2021)

When We Were Alone is one of my favorite picture books of all time, and this book powerfully reminded me of it. It’s a quiet story about a boy who goes with his moshom to visit the trapline where Moshom lived when he was a boy. He hasn’t been back in a long, long time, and the boy has never been. They take a plane north, to the little town where Moshom lived after he left the trapline, and then a boat to the trapline itself. Moshom remembers, and tells stories.

The best way I can describe the impact of this book is to say that it is spacious. The story is sparse. Every word feels important. The boy narrates what happens, what he sees and feels and thinks, but there’s a hushed quality to all of it. There is another story underneath the story, one of violence and loss and displacement and belonging and memory and coming home and community. It’s palpable, but subtle.

The illustrations feel like this, too. There is so much space inside of them. The way Flett draws the wide northern landscape—the lakes, the forests, the hills—leaves so much room to roam and imagine, to feel the deep connection between Moshom and the land, and thus between the boy and the land, too.

It’s so gentle and so powerful. Every page ends with a simple sentence that translates a Swampy Cree word into English. Behind these simple lines, too, are so many more stories, just hinted at. An exceptional book by one of the great duos in children’s literature, in my opinion.

Juana Martinez-Neal: Alma and How She Got Her Name (2018)

Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela thinks her name is too long. She asks her dad why she has SO MANY names, and so he tells her. He tells her the story of all the people she’s named after and why he picked those names for her. She finds treasures and connections and bits of herself in all the stories he tells.

Oh, I adored this. It made me think about names and what they mean, the importance of them, the sometimes not-importance of them. The feeling of belonging that comes from being named after someone in your family, and the feeling of wrongness or alienation that can come with that, too. I loved thinking about Alma’s long name as a thread stretching back and forward in time.

The art style is distinctive, with this muted color palette, mostly black and white with hints and pops of other colors. The drawings feel layered, almost like you can feel time passing in them. This is my favorite kind of picture book: a simple, beautiful story that makes me smile but also set off connections in my brain.

Wanda Gág: Millions of Cats (1928)

This is a hilarious book. A very old man and a very old woman live in a nice house surrounded by flowers, but they are not happy, because they are lonely, so the very old man goes out in search of a cat. Eventually he finds a hill “quite covered in cats.” Millions and billions of them, in fact. He picks one, then another, then another, because they are all so pretty, and eventually, he heads home with the “hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats” following him.

It’s a bit of a problem. But don’t worry. The very old man and the very old women and the millions of cats eventually sort themselves out—with a little violence. This is a book about cats, after all.

I could not stop laughing at this. It’s so absurd. The black and white illustrations, especially of the cats in the hills and the very old man trying to pick them all up, are amazing. The end is sweet, but also, to be honest, a bit dark, a bit grim. And this couple is so excellent! They are super into each other! But also! They are lonely all by themselves! They need a cat!

Whimsy, rhyme, a satisfying ending, a bit of an edge, art that’s alive and hilarious: perfection.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, Renée Watson (words) & Nikkolas Smith (art): The 1619 Project: Born on the Water (2021)

A young Black girl asks her grandma where she comes from for a school project, so her grandmother tells her their story. She tells her about their ancestors from Central Africa, and the Middle Passage, and the horrors of slavery, and the people who were born on the water, the people who survived and fought and loved and resisted, who made a new people, a new home, in the midst of unbelievable cruelty and horror. She tells the specific story of the first slave ship to land in the United States, and the first child born here to Black parents.

This is not an easy book. It made me think a lot about the starkness of picture books. As I was turning the pages, reading these gorgeous, devastating poems, looking at these stunning, detailed, expressive, paintings, what I felt in my heart was: how did this happen? How is this possible?

And of course I know how it happened. I have read many much more complex books about colonialism and white supremacy and the ongoing legacies of slavery and this deeply broken world we live in, my complicity in it, my grief in it. But sometimes a picture book like this—so deceptively simple, so unflinching—hits me differently.

Rachel Williams (words) & Freya Hartas (art): Slow Down; 50 Mindful Moments from Nature (2020)

What a stunning collection of little nature stories! Each story is a two-page comic about a simple but extraordinary moment that happens in the natural world. Many of these moments are ordinary—some of them happen every day—but the stories are detailed, slowed down. It’s like zooming in on wonder. The subjects include things like: a rainbow forming, dew collecting on a leaf, a spider weaving a web, moss soaking up rain in a forest, a ladybug taking off, a sparrow taking a bath, mushrooms growing, an ocean wave forming, leaves changing, a fox eating berries.

The illustrations are wonderful—bright, detailed, colorful panels that make each of these moments come alive. And the stories are truly, delightfully tiny. I love the mix of moments the book chooses to highlight. Some happen in seconds, like a ladybug taking flight, and others over many months, like leaves changing colors. All of these moments quick and slow, get the same careful attention. It’s magic.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: My community garden plot is going to be overflowing with flowers in a month or so.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!