Often value is placed on those things that people have previously forgotten about and disregarded for years. Comic books only became valuable when it Often value is placed on those things that people have previously forgotten about and disregarded for years. Comic books only became valuable when it became clear how many were thrown out of parents’ basements. A first edition copy of a book that had a limited print run at the start is worth more than a title whose worth was evident from day one. Children’s books, traditionally, are discounted in a similar manner. The word “juvenile” is synonymous, in some brains, with the infantile, childish, and unworthy. I well recall a children’s author once telling me how a friend was shocked that he wouldn’t consider writing for adults. “You’re like a gourmet chef making baby food!” Never mind that that’s how babies stay alive. Board books, of course, are the earliest forms of literature of all. For an egregious amount of time people believed that there was no value in reading to a baby. They can’t even see properly for the first few months, for crying out loud! Even today, there are parents that hold off on reading to their children until those kids can speak whole sentences (as backwards a method of education as ever you might conceive). Even amongst children’s authors and illustrators it is not particularly common to expect them to make a board book in their career. Sendak never did it, nor did Seuss (though, in the latter case, his works have been turned into board books since). Occasionally a contemporary creator will give it a go, but unless you’re Sandra Boyton it isn’t really seen as a place on which to rest a career. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before it became appealing as a challenge. Hervé Tullet started playing with the form, creating books that are meant for flashlights and small poky fingers. Seymour Chwast, near the end of his career, came up with the nose shaped Nosy, as inventive as it is playful. But Jon Klassen? He’s not doing quite the same thing. Having gotten a running start already with the “Your” board book series (Your Island, Your Farm, Your Truck, etc.) he’s decided to flex his muscles a little and go in a slightly different direction. Somewhere odd and interesting and ultimately a new direction for the board book genre. And it’s about bloody time too.
The house shaped board book states quite clearly what’s going on in its title. Open it and you are outside the house. The text is straightforward. “There is nobody in this house. There used to be somebody. But there is nobody now. Let’s go look inside.” With a turn of each page you go through a room, usually with one object inside. Through the doorways, you can spot what’s coming up. It’s all very straightforward until you get to the third room. “There is a small stool on the floor in this room. And a lamp.” Next to the doorway stands a ghost, silent and staring. “Let’s go into the next room,” reads the text. Now as you go on, the ghost is always peeking out from where it stood. The narrator continues, oblivious, until you’re outside. It repeats what it said at the start. “But there is nobody now,” it concludes. End of tale.
This is one of those cases where you read a children’s book, put it down, then stare into space for a little while, trying to figure out how to categorize it, classify it, and order it in your brain. I’m a children’s librarian by training. I read a book like this and I need to know how best to sell it to someone. Who is the intended audience, what is the intended use, and how does that jive with how the publisher sees it? Out of curiosity, I read the press materials for this book. What does Candlewick Press think that they have on their hands here? Generally speaking… yeah, they’re not quite sure. They’re trying to say that it’s like a good book for younger siblings of kids who are into Klassen's The Skull (an adapted Tyrolean folktale of infinite charm). I mean… sure. But that seems like a kind of limited way of looking at it. For all that I adored The Skull I’m not sure it’s a household name quite yet. Extra points to the person writing the ad copy, though, for saying that this book contains, “die cuts to introduce mystery and precarity…” LOVE the use of the word “precarity” there. Then they consider it a possible Halloween book, which is probably a good bet and not a bad way to go. I can’t blame them for taking this tactic anyway, since I think this book’s use is a bit too difficult to describe in an elevator pitch.
Essentially, I see this book as having two distinct uses. In the first case, it’s going to be a perfect preschool readaloud. The person doing the reading will reinforce the text that says that there’s nobody there, causing the small children in the audience to scream and yell that they’re wrong. There’s a ghost! It’s right there! 100 points to anyone reading the book who acts like they don’t know what the kids are talking about. That’ll drive them bonkers. Now the second use of the book is a little more personal. I can well imagine someone with a child on their lap reading it, and some children being highly disturbed by the concept of “nobody”. This is precisely the kind of book that will both disturb and fascinate them. They’ll be scared of it… then secretly crawl over to pull it from the shelf to read and reread precisely because it does unnerve them. It’ll work its way into the fissures and cracks of their gray matter, affecting their reading preferences for, potentially, their entire life. No average board book can do that. For that to happen, you need something a little weird, and particularly special. You need a book like this.
I’ve a disparaging term I like to use when I talk about board books that aren’t really meant for children: Coffee Table Board Books. You know the kind. The books that address adult topics in a board book form, for the sole purpose of making the parents of the kids look cool. Surprisingly (to me anyway) that description does not fit The House With Nobody In It. Not a jot. Not a smidgen. And it all comes down to its language. I often get a bit peeved when I encounter children’s book creators that are masterful at both writing and art. Seems unfair to the rest of us over here. Kadir Nelson falls into that category, and so does Jon Klassen, only Klassen seems to have mastered simplicity, which is a skill even most children’s book writers have failed to acquire. The book opens with “There is nobody in this house. There used to be somebody. But there is nobody now. Let’s go look inside.” That tone. How do you acquire a tone like that? And shoot, I’m just gonna say it, but please also note the font. Nobody talks about font choice in children’s books, but when you have a title like this one it can mean the world. Apparently it’s Helvetica LT Pro and I can guaran-damn-tee you that Klassen had a hand in that choice. There’s something that happens when the wordplay and the look of the wordplay combine that actually can affect how you read a book out loud. Your cadences cool. Your voice takes on a plummy quality. It’s as though the calm of the book seeps into your eyeballs and out your larynx, and, so help me, I don’t know how the man does it.
Now let’s talk about color. The house in question is a deep umber red, a color that miraculously does not come across the average reader as “barn”. The red is just a little too brown for that. The doorway and window with the ghost are black, which strikes one as a little spooky. Indeed, even the title page and publication page are pure black. Yet when you turn the page suddenly we’re outside the house again and it’s sunny. Sure, the sun appears to be setting, and the rooms in the home are cast with that end-of-day yellow and blue, but it’s still relatively chipper. As you turn the pages and walk through the home, however, not only are you moving farther and farther away from that sun, but the rooms themselves are darkening as the day closes. Ignore the clock that seems to indicate that it’s 12:55 (one can assume that the clock is busted in a house with “nobody” in it). A co-worker and I took note of the fact that the ghost appears in the first darker room (a deep forest green), and that the next rooms grow only a little bit darker and a little bit darker after that. Klassen isn’t overplaying his hand, and he’s being extremely careful with his color choices. The fact that the only objects in the last room are boots (where everything else was furniture) lends just the slightest increase to the creepy factor of it all. By the time you get outside the sun has set and a moon has risen. You get those final lines, “There is nobody in this house. There used to be somebody. But there is nobody now.” And it’s absolutely pitch perfect.
The board book was never originally designed to do much more than be a potentially munchable form of introducing kids to literature and books early on. Over the years its form has been tweaked and perfected. Flaps are now less likely to get tugged out. There are tactile elements, parts that spin, even mirrors sometimes. As children age, even if they’re still rough-handed preschoolers, they sometimes feel that they’ve graduated beyond board books. Yet, as any preschool teacher will attest, board books remain the number one way of providing small children with books that will last more than one or two reads. Jon Klassen’s interest in the form is, perhaps, the start of something new. Following The House With Nobody In It, he has the potential to inspire other creators and other publishers to explore and play with the form in more creative ways. If they do, though, they’re going to need to understand why exactly this book works. It isn’t because it’s cool (it is) or trendy looking (it is). It’s because it’s cool and trendy AND actually interesting to kids. This book respects very young readers. It respects their capacity to tell a story beyond the one in their hands. The House With Nobody In It is a jumping off point for small brains and imaginations. And because of the level of care and attention that Klassen has poured into this book, THAT, if anything, is why it’s going to succeed. The rare board book that threads the needle between what kids like and what adults like. In other words, this book lives in the sweet spot. Now pick it up and go see why....more
I think that until a parent starts reading picture books to their kids on the regular, there may be a perception that the best picture books are the fI think that until a parent starts reading picture books to their kids on the regular, there may be a perception that the best picture books are the flashy ones. Think of Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, or The Very Hungry Caterpillar or The Monster at the End of This Book. These books practically come with their own pyrotechnics, so filled are they with flash and bang and energy! But the quiet picture books (your Goodnight Moons and Our Lake by Angie Kang certainly falls into that category. After all, this is Ms. Kang’s debut, so she hasn’t the name recognition of some of her picture book contemporaries yet. The story (two boy leaping from a small cliff into a lake as they remember their father, now gone) is understated. Yet for all that, Our Lake not only holds its own in the face of its louder brethren, it's already amassed a bit of a following. Sometimes you need to watch out for the quiet books. They know how to sneak up on you.
“Today, Brother is taking me up to swim in the lake like Father used to do.” Up a steep hill the brothers climb until they read a plateau overlooking a lake. The two remove their shirts and stretch, but when the older brother steps forward, the younger hangs back. The day is hot, but the water seems so far away. Far away, that is, until the boy closes his eyes. He sees his father, how he’d leap into the water himself, and something in him changes. He leaps, he remembers, and he and his brother hug. “Here, in our lake, the water holds us close.”
Kang does such clever things with her art. Subtle things. Things you don’t necessarily notice on a first read. For example, after his brother has jumped, our main character stares down at the water and, “I inch forward until my toes meet the edge.” Those toes in the art, however, look a million miles away from his head. There’s this fascinating forced perspective at work. Psychologically, it does a marvelous job of putting you into the main character’s head. His hands and feet are small, his head huge, and the water, “looks so far away.” And then there’s the water itself. I can pinpoint with utmost precision the point at which the book had me in its hooks. The older brother has just jumped and for a moment you see him under the water before he reemerges. Kang manages to paint the distorted view of someone through water, while still making the figure recognizable. You can even make out the bubbles of air that escape his mouth amid the ripples. Incredible.
It looks simple. It looks easy. But Kang also fills the book with small moments and callbacks. In the flashback to the past, we see the boys’ father wearing a red hat. The same red hat, you realize, that the older brother was wearing this day. We even see the day the man put it on the older brother’s head. This transference of an objection imbues not just the hat itself with meaning, but the action of the brother wearing it on this particular day. After all, what are the boys doing when we first meet them? The older brother is sitting, assiduously tying his little brother’s shoelaces. He’s taken on the role of interim father, in the absence of that parent. Now the day takes on a different tone entirely. It’s as if the older brother is doing whatever it is that he can to give his little brother those moments he would have gotten if their father was still around. There’s a reason that the final parting shot of the book (not counting the Polaroid on the publication page) is of that same hat sitting on top of the boys’ clothes and towels.
Now look at the colors. Kang insists on making the sky yellow and the water blue. The yellow sky wasn’t something I noticed at all initially, but once I did I began trying to figure out whether or not it changes in the course of the book. Before our main character has his epiphany and jumps, the yellow is still there, but tucked away behind treetops and branches. I had to check and see if it was the same shade of yellow at the front and climax of the book. It was, but my curiosity sprung from the fact that it just seems more vibrant after the boy decides to jump. Of course, once he makes that decision it’s not hidden anymore. We get shots from below, up at him, with the sky taking center stage, his body silhouetted against it. The endpapers are an interesting mix too. At first the front endpapers and back endpapers seem to match. In both you have that yellow sky up above. But take a closer look and you’ll see a streak of telltale orange on the back endpapers. An orange that isn’t all that dissimilar from the shade of the father’s hat.
You can write a book with a good story and clever art and still end up with a dud in the end. Why? Quality of writing, my friends. If your text doesn’t sing, and if it doesn’t have those little moments of insights that elevate it all, then you may well have a nice book, but you won’t have a great one. Our Lake represents a perfect synchronicity between these elements. For all that there’s heart and visual splendor, there’s a cleverness to the written text as well. When the younger brother jumps, the book says that his older brother congratulates him but, “His smile is crooked, as if half of him is happy and the other half is not. As if maybe he is remembering Father too.”
Something about this book reminds me of the world of fellow picture book creator Sydney Smith. What, exactly, I cannot say. Maybe it’s something to do with the tone of the text. Or maybe this feels like a book that Smith would have made himself, had Kang asked him to (illustrators often illustrate other illustrators’ works, after all). For all that, this is one of those debuts that makes a person wonder where the book came from. So I did a little research. In June of 2022, Kang published a small illustrated story in the online literary magazine The Offing. The story, called The Dip, tells the story of a family alongside a lake. The father, who very much resembles the dad in this book, strips down and leaps in. The mother is then left with a small child and dog, reassuring both that he’ll come back. The similarities to Our Lake are unmistakable, but it also feels like a companion to this piece. In that story, the father will come back to them. In this story, he never will.
I don’t usually do this, but I tooled about Amazon and Goodreads to try and determine what it is about Our Lake that is so appealing to people. Readers call it “quiet”, “poignant”, “thoughtful,” and more, but the words that come up the most are “grief” and “mourning”. It’s funny, but for all that, the book doesn’t feel as if it’s depressing or anything. Maybe that’s its secret. There a peace at its core. A reassurance that if we let ourselves remember the people who left us, we can begin to heal. Still, I don’t primarily think of this as a grief book. It’s woven into the fabric of the piece, no question, but it’s so much more than that too. It's a brother story. A celebration of water and sky, and that moment when you let yourself leap off into space. It’s also a physically beautiful book, but in a way that rewards close readings. Let us hope that folks have a chance to find it for themselves in the cacophony of picture book publishing today. I wouldn’t worry too much about it, though. The cream rises to the top. The readers will find this book....more
I miss when my kids had me read comics to them all the time. We had this whole routine where at bedtime we’d alternate between a novel one night and aI miss when my kids had me read comics to them all the time. We had this whole routine where at bedtime we’d alternate between a novel one night and a graphic novel the next. This method meant that we went through a LOT of comics for kids. I always had a pile by the bed, and when we finished one I’d spread out all the possibilities and they’d select the next one that interested them. But while graphic novels for kids retain their popularity, even as other types of literature wax and wane, children grow up. They seek out older fare. And here I am, a librarian with a specialty in children’s books, now watching the hoards of unread kids comics pile up, pile up, pile up on my To be Read shelf. It’s intimidating. In a sea of comics, how do you know which ones to read first? One technique is to find someone tried and true. Someone with a keen sense of humor, an eclectic drawing style, and who does plots in their books that no one else does. Someone who is, essentially, Gale Galligan. They’re the kind of creator who makes comics that fool you into thinking they’re like everybody else, then hit you with key, fantastic, differences. Their latest? The best of the lot. Hands down.
Ollie has it all figured out. Because of her dad’s job as a diplomat, the family is constantly moving around the world. Never settling in one place too long. Never putting down roots. And Ozzie? Ozzie LOVES it. Because when you’re never in one place for all that long, you can escape embarrassment and shameful moments easily. So imagine her surprise when Ollie and fam plop down in Chestnut Falls, Virginia and she is immediately told that they’re here to stay. Potential catastrophe! After all, Ozzie’s an incredibly outgoing and enthusiastic person, but she doesn’t know these kids. When she meets a group of kids that share her love of imagination and comics she realizes she may have found her group. But when something terrible and embarrassing happens, what then?
Like many people I first became aware of the work of Gale Galligan when they took over illustrating the Baby-sitters Club comics after Raina Telgemeier (and how interesting is it that both Gale and Raina have GNs out this year about groups of kids making comics?). Galligan’s style probably has an official term amongst comic academics that I just don’t know. It’s sort of manga-inspired with a lot of the visual tropes in place, yet it is undeniably American to its core. As part of the Scholastic Graphix line, it’s not supposed to surprise you with shifting its style. Yet Galligan, to my surprise, got much more creative with her art here. At certain key points in the narrative, Ollie draws her own comic series, so we need to see a kid-version of what a comic might look like. But even more than that, there’s this level of sophistication to each and every page. Galligan’s manga influences are worked seamlessly into the images, sometimes going almost chibi, often utilizing a fair number of visual motifs and cues. Turn to any two-page spread in this book and just marvel at the way Galligan lays out her panels. We see so many comics published these days (such a start contrast from when I first started working as a children’s librarian) but it isn’t until you read a book like Fresh Start that you begin to appreciate true skill in the medium.
I love a graphic novel for kids that looks all light and fluffy and then hits you with some serious content when you’re not expecting it. Ollie’s struggles with being bi-racial, her feeling that she’s not Thai enough, and her friend drama… those are topics I’ve seen done. They're important, and I'm very glad to see them here too, but I wouldn't say they're singular. Then there are the elements of the book that were a little different. The one that I was particularly interested in was the difference between Ollie’s relationship to her parents and her younger sister’s relationship. Do you know how difficult it is for the favored child in a family to realize that they’re really and truly their parents' favorite? Particularly if they’re the older sibling? Cat and Ollie get along, but their parents hold Cat to standards that are entirely different than Ollie's. As a result, there is a moment at the end of the book where Ollie decides to take the initiative and change things in her family that just struck me as incredible (and a helluva way to end a book too). It’s not that their parents are bad people, but they are uniquely flawed. Their mom, for example, has a tendency to use the silent treatment against them in a particularly immature and damaging way. It’s incredible to see.
Oh. And it’s funny. Galligan is also funny in real life, as it turns out. I’d never seen them in person until this year, when I watched them present in front of a room of 200-300 local educators from the Chicago area. Humor on demand is draining, yet Galligan seemed just buoyed with energy. That translates to the page, and just as the range of art styles is impressive, so too is the range of different ways of being funny. There’s just straight up jokes, of course. Situational humor. And then there’s visual humor, but that’s sort of a blanket term for the myriad ways to do humor visually. Aside from the serious moments in the book (and yes, it has some) the jokes fly fast and furious on almost every single page. I’m the kind of person who thinks that it would probably be fun to chart and graph each joke, noting what kind it is, how it was told, whether it’s visual or verbal, etc. Oh. You can talk about this all SORTS of ways.
Hot Take: Bullies are cheap ways to build emotion into your children’s book plots. They’re easy antagonists. You don’t have to give them justifications or backstories if you don’t want to, and if you do want to then you can feel good about being a writer capable of nuance. But me? I don’t like ‘em. I don’t like reading about them or getting to know them or anything. So when I see a book like Fresh Start I feel like its very existence justifies my anti-bully books stance. This book is bully bereft. Ollie doesn’t come to this new school and then have that classic encounter-the-bully-right-off-the-bat obligatory scene. And really, why insert a bully when the main character is so good at bullying herself instead?
Oh. And there are lots of facts about hedgehogs too. I was really trying to find a way to work that fact in, but couldn’t really slide it into any of these other paragraphs. Hence the teeny tiny paragraph here. Hedgehogs. They’re cool. And the one that Ollie gets as a pet is always rendered incredibly realistically, which makes sense in context, but was clearly a very conscious choice on Galligan’s part.
It's just such a relief to encounter a graphic novel quite as good as this one. It really does strike me as a perfect melding of all the ideal parts of a comic. It’s funny, but handles the serious subject matter (how to take care of a hedgehog, feelings of shame, what to do when you hurt someone, parental drama) with a steady hand. The art is accessible and fun, but also is just as ready to draw its characters in the style of Animal Crossing avatars or as mock manga. And the plot is juggling about seven different themes all at once without ever dropping a single solitary ball. Look, it’s dangerous to go about saying one book or another is perfect, and I’m sure this title has some flaws in it. I just have no possible clue what they might be. It’s the gold standard for contemporary comics for kids. More of this, please. More of this. ...more
Daniel Nayeri keeps getting away with murder. Where other authors follow the beaten path and churn out respectable, comprehensible, perfectly decent wDaniel Nayeri keeps getting away with murder. Where other authors follow the beaten path and churn out respectable, comprehensible, perfectly decent works of historical fiction, Nayeri has this tendency to sort of pad in before blowing up assumptions left, right, and center. One Such Assumption: Historical Fiction is boring. If the first few pages of Nayeri’s Newbery Honor winning title The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams didn’t upend that idea entirely (running for your life from monks that want to stone you to death is always a good start) then I’m not sure what else could. Or how about the (unspoken) assumptions that historical fiction for kids is long, usually set in America (though you can get away with Europe if it involves a war), and should be deadly serious. The Teacher of Nomad Land should, by all rights, AT LEAST be joke-free, right? I mean, it’s friggin’ set in Iran during WWII. That sounds serious! And it has orphans and nasty German spies and Holocaust survivors. Yet I’ve noticed something about Daniel Nayeri. With every middle grade novel for kids that he writes he gets a little bit sharper. A little bit sleeker. A little bit funnier. A little bit faster. And this latest title? It’s a little bit one of the best books of the year and then some. It’s a little bit legendary.
It’s World War II in Iran (1941) and Babak and his kid sister Sana have been orphaned. Their father, who teaches the nomads how to read and write, was accidentally killed when he was mistaken for an enemy by British soldiers. When staying with relatives becomes intolerable, Babak and Sana set forth to join the nomads themselves. Their plan is simple. Babak will pick up where his father left off as a teacher, and Sana will do whatever odd jobs need doing. Unfortunately, this plan falls apart pretty quickly and the next thing the kids know they’re on their own, trying to trace their steps back the way they came over the mountains. Little do they know they’ll soon be escaping a Nazi soldier, take on the Jewish boy he’s tracking, befriend a British soldier, and solve a language puzzle all with the aid of the blackboard Babak keeps strapped to his back.
I wouldn’t say that I’m against war novels, but I don’t seek them out on a regular basis. So while I know that the subtitle of this book (“A World War II Story”) will probably lure in some readers, for kids like me they may need a bit of coaxing. Maybe you should tell them that it’s deeply enjoyable, because that was certainly my greatest shock upon getting a page or two into it. The two main characters have just been orphaned and they’re distraught but by page four Babak and his sister are debating the best way to write the word “Baba” on his gravestone and whether or not a stick or a dull knife is going to get the job done. It’s incredible how quickly Nayeri is able to not only catch up the reader in terms of time, place, and actions that have just occurred (the death of Baba), but he has the ability to establish both these characters' personalities and their relationship to one another in record time. That’s impressive, but what’s extraordinary is that you also really like them. Some writers struggle and strain to make their characters likeable and then here’s Nayeri just making it happen almost instantaneously. Authors Beware: Reading this book may cause extreme bouts of envy.
I’m sure that the fact that the entire book is written in the present tense means something. I don’t know what, precisely, but the act is so rare in the world of children’s literature that it stands out. It would be as if this book were written in the second person. Clearly Nayeri did it on purpose, but why? If I were to loft a theory in your general direction, I’d wager that it had something to do with telling a tale from the past. WWII is ancient history of kids yet in the characters of Babak and Sana young readers find characters that (as I mentioned before) you relate to instantly. It all comes down to Nayeri’s writing, which is punctuated throughout not just with humor but with these little bright spots of writing. I listened to the audiobook which is a marvelous way to be introduced to this title (Nayeri reads it himself, and that’s a particular treat) but it didn’t allow me to highlight the lines I liked best. I’d just be listening and then all at once the text would be punctuated by these little spots of brilliance or insightfulness or cleverness. It’s incredibly good, and the plot? The plot is everything you would want. Danger, friendship, frustration, and a chase sequence at the end that you won’t be able to stop thinking about.
The best writers for kids respect kids. Or, rather, respect kids’ capacity for complexity. If you view childhood through the gauzy glass of nostalgia, conveniently forgetting all its sharp edges and contrasts, then your writing will reflect that. If, on the other hand, you’ve a fair view of it and a willingness to give kids something to chew on, your book will be all the better for it. Take the soldiers in this book. There is a moment in the book when Babak is reunited with a British soldier who has been kind to him. Until now Nayeri has done an exquisite job of explaining why the citizens of Iran aren’t particularly fond of the British. Yet the man has been a kind face in a harsh war. Even so, there comes a moment when soldiers, including this one, from a variety of nations engage in a demand of bribes that isn’t just expected, it’s perfunctory. This isn’t something that is seriously challenged, not even from the seemingly kind British man. Being nice to kids is one thing, but getting a cut of profits is another entirely.
Even more complicated and difficult is the character of Ben, the Jewish boy on the run. He’s lived through horrors, lost his family, escaped and starved and survived, and through it all Nayeri adamantly refuses to make him two-dimensional. Considering what he’s lived through, it almost feels dangerous for the author to give the guy a distinct personality, but that’s precisely what’s happened here. Ben, you absolutely know, isn’t looking for pity. Not from the other characters and not from the reader. He has goals and dreams and he’s determined to follow through on them. As a result, he's spiky and difficult at times, and watching the dynamic between him and the siblings is utterly unique. When they first find him, you think you know where the relationship might go, but it’s isn’t like that at all. Ben is completely real, and you get the sense that he wouldn’t want to be predictable. It’s something you have to respect.
For the record, I didn’t know where any of this was going either. I have a tendency to avoid plot descriptions when I pick up books, just on the off-chance that there’s some big reveal spoiled there (it happens more often than you’d think). I like walking into a book cold, trying to predict where the author is going with the story. I’ve read enough novels for kids that often I’m right. However, with The Teacher of Nomad Land I felt completely out to sea. For example, there’s a big significant moment that happens at Chapter 11 that had me completely baffled. Wait.. the story’s going in THAT direction now? But… but… what???
Oh. Quick warning, by the way. I'm invoking the “Grace Lin Rule”. Which is to say, read this book on a full stomach. Years ago I sat on the tarmac of an airport as my flight decided it would rather just sit without moving for hours on end, as my stomach rumbled. Having decided that it would be a good idea to read a Grace Lin book to pass the time, I found myself drooling over long passages involving descriptions of food that made my hunger far worse than it would have been otherwise. Nayeri does something similar in this book. Babak and Sana don’t have a lot of food with them, but when they prepare meals you might feel inclined towards voraciousness. One particular meal involves flatbread, cooked shallots and zalzalaks (similar to crabapples), ghee butter, cheese, and honeycomb. Doggone it. I’m hungry just writing that.
I dunno. It’s just sort of the best. The kind of book you read and then instantly recognize as incredible and a future classic (though we’re not supposed to invoke the “C” word so soon). But anyone that reads this title will recognize that fact. Apparently, if you just reduce Nayeri’s words down to their most essential parts, you get a book that kids will genuinely enjoy reading and that their adult gatekeepers will acknowledge as “great literature” and all that. Humor and heart. Kid-friendliness and scintillating writing. Characters you care about, a plot you can’t predict, and a setting I am almost certain has never appeared in an American middle grade novel before. This review is probably just as long as the book is, and not half as interesting, so I’ll end it there. And if you’re lucky, you’ll find yourself a copy and start reading it yourself. See what all the fuss is about. ...more
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