Volume 4, No. 29: Fresh Fades, Berry Songs, & Bodies of Water

Greetings, book and treat people!

On May 8th, I made a big ask. I asked the folks who read this newsletter (that’s you!) to become paying subscribers ($5/month) so that I can continue writing it. I asked because I’ve been working this job (yup, it’s a job!) for close to nothing for over 3 years, and I can’t do that anymore. I asked even though I was terrified.

I set myself a financial goal and a cutoff date. That date is next Wednesday, July 31st. Every week, as the cutoff date approaches, this newsletter gets harder and harder for me to write. I haven’t come anywhere close to reaching my goal. It’s unlikely, after three months, that I’m going to meet it in the next week.

I wish I had something more cheerful to say, but all I have is the truth: I am so tired. I am so tired of pouring my heart into work that is not valued. I was tired of it before I asked for fair compensation, and now I’m bone-deep tired of it. Honestly, the exhaustion is a relief. It means I’m not pretending anymore. I asked for what I needed and I didn’t get it. This is often what happens when we take risks! I know my own worth and I know my own limits. I’m so proud of what I’ve done here over the past 3+ years. As I wrote at the beginning of this whole experiment: “Asking for what I need to keep doing this work isn’t failure—even if I don’t receive it. As much as I cherish writing this newsletter every week, continuing to do so in a way that isn’t sustainable for me is the real failure.”

So, what’s going to happen to Books & Bakes now? Here’s what you need to know:

• First and foremost: Thank you, thank you, thank you, to everyone who subscribed or pledged to subscribe over the last three months. I am deeply grateful to each and every one of you. Truly.

• Second: You can still subscribe! It’s not too late!

• Finally, while I didn’t come anywhere close to meeting my goal, which would have allowed me to continue writing a weekly newsletter, I now have enough paying subscribers to make writing a monthly newsletter sustainable! I’m planning on doing this through the end of the year to see how it feels. I’ll share more details next week.

Okay, onward to books! Here’s the thing: everything is really hard and I’m struggling. I’m struggling to find the focus and motivation to read and write, struggling to get through my work days, struggling to make dinner. I’ve read less in July than I have in any other month in the last 3 years. But, guess what: through all of this malaise, I have been reading picture books. I have been writing about picture books. Picture books are carrying me through. So: picture books.

I hope you’re being as gentle with yourself as you can be. I hope something, even a tiny something, is carrying you through. If you’re struggling, I hope you know you’re not alone. My friend , in her beautiful newsletters (full of amazing picture book reviews!) often reminds me that I am not alone. This newsletter is definitely after her—in the poetic tradition of afters.

Cao Wenxuan, tr. Chloe Garcia-Roberts (words) & Roger Mello (art), Feather (2013)

Earlier this year I went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, and one of the exhibits was on Brazilian author/artist Roger Mello. I immediately put a bunch of his books on hold. This is the first one I’ve read, and I adored it.

The story is about Feather, who gets blown around on the wind, and sometimes rests for a while in tufts of grass. She wants to know who she belongs to, so she asks every bird she encounters: a cuckoo, a peacock, a kingfisher, a magpie. The birds are all busy with their own lives—hunting, flying, fishing, admiring their own feathers. They all tell Feather the same thing: “No, not mine.” But Feather doesn’t give up.

The story is simple and philosophical and a little strange and very satisfying. The art is incredible. I don’t know how to describe it. The birds are so beautiful and textured. Flapping wings drawn with intricate patterns. Long legs that twist around in loops. Beaks in so many different shades. The birds look exactly like themselves, but heightened. A little magical, not quite real. The pages are all different colors, and these background colors paired with the bright birds makes the whole book so vivid.

I loved the author’s and illustrator’s notes at the beginning. Wenxuan writes about his inspiration for the story, and Mello about what it was like illustrating it. This is my favorite kind of picture book, with a satisfying repetitive structure and a sweet ending, but with many imaginative and moving layers underneath.

Michaela Goade, Berry Song (2022)

This is an absolutely gorgeous book. A Tlingit girl and her grandmother go walking around the Tongass National Forest in Alaska where they live (and where Goade lives, and where the Tlingit people have lived for generations upon generations), picking berries and sharing stories.

The text is simple. The girl explains what her people sing about and why, sharing the berry song that moves through the seasons and reminds them that they are part of the land, that they belong to the land and are of the land, that they therefore are responsible to the land, as the land is responsible to them.

The art is incandescent. It actually feels incandescent! So much of it sparkles and glows. The berries shine with dew and sunlight. There’s also an incredible sense of space and scope: the big old trees and the rivers and the sea; all the creatures; the changing colors of the berries and plants in different seasons; the sunsets and sunrise. The art overflows with the land. It feels like an embodiment of what the grandma in the story repeats over and over again: “We are a part of the land…” and what the girl repeats: “as the land is a part of us.”

I turned the pages as slowly as I could, reveling in their beauty. I especially loved the drawings of spirits and ancestors in the sea and rivers and dirt, and the ones where the girl is a part of the landscape, with roots growing from her arms and plants growing from her hair. 10/10, no notes.

Jack Wong, When You Can Swim (2023)

This book is special. I felt a sense of reverence while reading it. I love water more than almost anything else on this earth, and this book is a lover letter to bodies of water: oceans, tide pools, lakes, ponds, streams, rivers, waterfalls. I saw my own deep love of water reflected in the pages, but this is not just a book for people who grew up loving water. It’s also—maybe even more so—for people who grew up thinking swimming was not for them.

The story moves through various bodies of water, following characters of different races, ages, and genders as they swim. Every sentence starts with: “When you can swim…” and goes on from there, as an adult shares all the wonderful things they’ll do together once the child learns to swim: look up at the trees while floating, dive deep, swim to an island, discover underwater worlds.

The art is extraordinary. There are so many kinds of water represented, and they are all so beautiful—the ripples of sunlight on a waterfall, the stormy surface of an ocean, pebbles in clear water. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that captures the soul of water so well.

Wong’s author’s note is so moving. He writes about how, growing up as an immigrant kid in Canada, he never felt safe or comfortable in pools. He writes about his grandmother, who swam in rivers during her childhood in Indonesia, and his mom, who was forbidden from swimming during her childhood China, due to common drownings and water-related accidents. Wong’s own relationship to swimming was complicated by these inheritances, and by the racism he experienced at pools in his own childhood. It wasn’t until adulthood that he began to love swimming and feel a sense of belonging in wild bodies of water.

He describes this book as building a world, a welcoming world where swimming belongs to everyone. He also writes about how, while researching the book, he went to all his favorite swimming places and swam and dove and sketched and took photos. His love of all these places comes through in the art. 100/10, no notes.

Shauntay Grant (words) & Kitt Thomas (art), My Fade is Fresh (2022)

Ahhh! I LOVE THIS BOOK! A girl walks into the barber shop determined to get “the freshest fade up on the block.” She knows what she wants, but there are SO MANY PEOPLE in the shop and they have SO MANY OPINIONS! What follows is a hilarious and rhyming poem. Everyone gives the barber tons of advice about how to do this young girl’s hair, but no matter what the barber does, our heroine continues telling her exactly what she wants until she finally gets the haircut of her dreams.

I really cannot explain the perfection of this poem. The rhymes! The meter! It’s all SO DELICIOUS. It’s begging to be SUNG! To be SHOUTED! To be STOMPED! It is language joy and Black hair joy, and it all flies off the page, and I am here for it. The art is sprawling and chaotic and full of bright colors and big shapes. There’s hair everywhere. Sometimes the drawings are straightforward representations of the barbershop, and sometimes the hair comes alive. It’s marvelous. This whole book is nothing but a joy to read.

Miranda Paul (words) & Jason Chin (art), Water is Water: A Book About the Water Cycle (2015)

I love books with rhyming and/or symmetrical and/or nesting structures. This book is all of those things, and WOW IT’S GOOD! It starts, on the first page, with this little poem: “Drip. Sip. Pour me a cup. Water is water unless…” The poem continues on the next page with: “it heats up.” Finishing the rhyme! Perfect! The whole book is like this. Each page ends with “unless…” and on the next page, water transforms. From water to steam to clouds to fog to rain to puddles…

The illustrations move through the seasons and all the different parts of the water cycle, as children go about their days, splashing in puddles, skating on a frozen pond, tramping around in the mud, picking apples to press into cider. In the end, it all comes comes full circle. Jason Chin’s paintings are beautiful, full of depth and detail. So many swirls and shades and splashes and water-shapes!

I honestly wasn’t expecting to be so enchanted by this book. But give me a perfectly executed pattern and delicious language (”Slosh in galoshes” is a joy) and I will fall in love.

Effie Lee Newsome (words) & Lois Mailou Jones (art), Gladiola Garden (1940)

Effie Lee Newsome was a Harlem Renaissance writer and one of the first African American poets to become well-known for writing children’s poetry. This collection from 1940 is a delight.

The poems are organized into sections with perfect names, such as: At the Creek, Insects and Spiders, Puppets and Cookies (my favorite), The Skies, Squirrel Folk and Others, and Trees. I was already enamored with the book after reading the table of contents.

The poems are short (often just one or two quatrains), metrical, and rhyming. They’re often silly. Many of them just describe nature: birds eating and flying, trees in different seasons, all kinds of weather, flowers growing, spiders weaving webs. There are also story poems about dolls, puppets, bakeries, and kids playing. The language is simple but whimsical. There’s a timeless quality to these poems, and a deep sense of wonder in them, that I find enchanting.

The black and white illustrations are so evocative, and they often capture the heart of a particular poem with just one image: dew on a spider web, a jar of cookies, a snow-covered field, a stuffed dog, a cardinal singing on a branch.

Here’s one of my favorite poems, and a good example of the quiet, wholesome tone of this whole collection.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe SecretI used to think the trees were bareWhen leaves had blown away.But I've found hosts of buds wait thereTo open some spring day.

Thanks for being here, bookish friends!