Taraneh Matloob’s new picture book, Dear New Friend, feels like an invitation to step into its pages ro meet the Persian family she portrays. Many little touches set this up—a secret knock, a grandmother humming a tune, and watermelon!

Oh, and watermelon seeds—and you can tell what comes after that, can’t you? Taraneh’s path has crossed mine in other ways in the past, in her capacity as a translator (she translated my friend Susan Fletcher’s Shadow Spinner into Farsi) and a children’s literature scholar. I’m delighted to have this conversation with her here.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Egyptian Canadian journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad, was selected for discussion in the Ink Book Club earlier this summer.

A title that begins like a story (One Day…) contains a promise about the narrative to come. The comma, with its implied pause, suggests that this will be a complex book and I ought to pick it up and expect to spend some time trying to come to terms with it.

And how could I not find irresistible the use of the future perfect tense, “will have been…?”

Paul Lynch thought his novel would never be published. He thought the book would destroy his career. It won the 2023 Booker. He also sees it as a personal rather than a political book. Well, okay.

Prophet Song is the story of Eilish, a biologist and mother of four whose life in a suburb of Dublin is upended by the secret police showing up at her home looking for her husband Larry, who is a teacher’s union leader. Larry disappears and never returns. The backdrop is a country sliding into totalitarianism and civil war, a setting that feels uneasily like the present time in the United States.

The beauty of this book lies in how its story unfolds in the small frame of one woman’s experience, told by a narrator who is at once painfully close to her and yet aware of dangers she cannot yet sense.

“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” These lines are by Italian philosopher, politician, and linguist Antonio Gramsci, written from within a Fascist prison. Amitav Ghosh points out that Gramsci would have had difficulty comprehending the monsters of our time.

A cultural anthropology take on the quote and its meaning can be found here.

Ever since my Book Uncle and Me turned into the Book Uncle trilogy, I’ve been paying extra attention to books that start out by standing alone and then take off on their own paths. Some characters seem to demand that their writers turn their lives, adventures, families, and communities into multiple books.

VCFA graduate Jenn Bailey’s wonderfully whimsical character Henry first caught my attention with A Friend for Henry. Henry is a wistful little character, a kid who notices stuff, who’s capable of gleaning insights from the classroom goldfish—a kid with an inner life of consequence. So I was thrilled to see Henry sequels appear: Henry, Like Always, Henry and the Something New, and Henry’s Picture-Perfect Day, with still more to come. Henry, I hasten to add, did not disappoint. Each book enriches and expands on its quirky young character and his lovingly drawn community.

In Our Green Heart: The Soul and Science of Forests, botanist, biochemist, biologist, and poet Diana Beresford-Kroeger challenges us all to explore the deep connections that forests offer us. Here’s a scientist who listens to trees and in this book she opens up her life and experience in brief, lively chapters—her childhood, her personal arboretum where she nurtures rare and endangered species, navigating the contradictions and commonalities in old wisdom and new science.

The Ink Book Club calls itself Democracy in Action. From their web site:

Why a democracy book club? Thomas Jefferson may never actually have written that “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people,” but the NEA’s 2004 Reading at Risk report did come out and say that “a well-read citizenry is essential to a vibrant democracy.”

We endorse that position wholeheartedly, and we’re taking that as our starting point. But while building democracy is a big part of the reason we read newsletters like this one, it’s only part of the reason we read overall. Books are paths to understanding ourselves and others, and to understanding the world, and they can also be a balm in troubled times.

Eclectic as my reading fare tends to be, I probably would not have picked up, of my own accord, the book they selected for discussion. It’s Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, an argument for a politics of abundance as opposed to one of scarcity. But since Anand Giridharadas was suggesting it, I figured I’d give it a try. I’d really enjoyed his India Calling, part family memoir, part travelogue, and I like the posts on The Ink! Substack, so I picked up a copy and got to work.

I joined a book discussion last month through the Democratic Party’s Global Women’s Caucus. The book we all read is an iconic text—Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which I’ve focused on earlier in this blog. The first of the trilogy, it was published in 1993, and behold! The years that it’s set in have become our present.

“The wall before me is burning. Fire has sprung from nowhere, has eaten in through the wall, has begun to reach toward me, reach for me.”

Fire dreams feel like the reality of our time. (For more on a fictional depiction of fire in our pyrocene age, see Caroline Starr Rose’s reflections on her novel, The Burning Season.) But fire is just one of the elements that make Butler’s work feel astonishingly prescient.

One thread we discussed was the struggle between the comforts and costs of living in the modern industrial world. The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, dreams of the stars:

“The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars,” I said. “That's the ultimate Earthseed aim, and the ultimate human change short of death. It's a destiny we’d better pursue if we hope to be anything other than smooth-skinned dinosaurs—here today, gone tomorrow, our bones mixed with the bones and ashes of our cities, and so what?”

In reality, look how that dream, which feels so boldly innocent in Butler’s telling, has now been coopted by shamelessly rich men toward their own selfish ends.

Susan Fletcher is no stranger to my bookshelf, to my circle of writer friends and colleagues, or, for that matter, to this blog. I’ve been enchanted by her Journey of the Pale Bear, by the luminous setting and the endearing band of waifs in Falcon in the Glass, and by the spirited character of Marjan in Shadow Spinner. Her Dragon Chronicles (Dragon’s Milk, Flight of the Dragon Kyn, Sign of the Dove, and Ancient, Strange, and Lovely) play out over a timespan that stretches from a Welsh-inspired storyscape all the way to the thump of an egg and the life of a girl in Oregon, in a polluted present time.

Now Susan brings us Sea Change, a reworking of the story of The Little Mermaid. It’s a YA science fiction tale of a gill-breathing girl contending with family and community and love on a climate-impacted Texas coast.

As a picture book writer who is not also an illustrator, I only have my mind to work with, so when people ask me how my process works, it’s easy to freeze, to default to not knowing. Not knowing makes me inclined to wonder if the art and craft of it all might be purely instinctive. Or worse, perhaps a fluke. So while I was looking at my own book, Look! Look! in this context, I thought I’d ask a couple of writers in my critique group (affectionately dubbed The Autodidacts) to weigh in: Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and Caroline Starr Rose.

I asked each of them to think about one of her picture books to find something that changed between the early draft and the final book.

Vaunda wrote about Almost to Freedom (2004 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book):

I was working on the final phase of Almost to Freedom.  The story is historical — about a family trying to escape slavery — and I am always concerned about getting the history correct.