'Twas a picture book-heavy reading list this month. I am very firmly a mood reader, so I never set my reading list ahead of time. These were mostly lying around the house.
Finding Narnia: The Story of C.S. Lewis and His Brother Warnie is the first book I read this year. As you know, I collect books about Narnia and C.S. Lewis (and by him). This one is a picture book biography by Caroline McAlister and illustrated by Jessica Lanan. It briefly tells the big-picture, broad-strokes story of C.S. Lewis's imaginative, creative, and physical life, from his childhood to his middle age (when he wrote
The Chronicles of Narnia). It focuses a bit more on young Jack and Warnie's fantasy kingdoms that they made up, and how they joined them so they could play together. I learned a few things, such as that Warnie was the one who typed the manuscripts of
The Chronicles of Narnia, which CSL handwrote! The illustrations appear to be watercolor, and I was pleasantly surprised to find an illustrator's note after the story where Jessica Lanan wrote about going to these places in Lewis's life (the Kilns, Oxford, etc.) and how she patterned places and objects to look like the real thing. She includes endnotes about liberties she took (for example, she painted the wardrobe that inspired THE wardrobe lighter than the one in real life, in order to show off the carved details). I appreciated this, and the illustrator's notes made me like this book even more. This book was a real treat, and CSL fans will love it. It deals with Narnia less than the title suggests, but Narnia fans will like this too, I think. I'm not sure how kids will like it past Jack & Warnie's childhoods. 4.5 out of 5 stars, keeping obviously. Source: Book Outlet.
Trigger warnings for this book: death, war mentions, wound mention, grief mention, atheism and Christianity
After that I read
The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish by Tim Flannery, which is a historical fiction/mystery novel set in Australia and partially the Venus Islands in the 1930s. This young museum anthropologist guy goes to live with the Venus Island people for five years, then has to readjust to white Australian life and keep the museum director happy while finding out what happened to missing museum curators. He suspects the VIF has something to do with it (see title). He also has to try to win back his girlfriend and would-be fiancee, who flipped out when he gave her a penile love token as a proposal. This had that fun retro vibe I look for in comic early twentieth century lit, but it was weighed down by period-typical racism towards Aboriginals and Venus Islanders (and Italian immigrants). The main guy's roommate sets out to learn about Australia's bloody, horrible colonial past (it's much like America's with the genocide and child murder, etc.). It's good that the author didn't shy away from that and just pretend colonial Australia was hunky dory, but it did make this a much more difficult read than I was anticipating. The fact that so much of museums' historical collections are stolen from indigenous and non-European/Western people is also included in this book (the VIF is stolen). Personally, we spent way too much time with the roommate and the rich museum donor (sort of a Trump type); it didn't really add anything to the story. I wish we'd spent more time with the Venus Islanders; they were cool.
The ending was kind of rushed and weird? I also didn't get the literary device of pretending the story was found in a stuffed monkey in the Sydney museum; it also didn't add anything to it. I did like reading a book from Australia; usually everything I read is from the US or England. I did overall enjoy this (minus the awful colonial racism parts). 3.5 stars. Source: Dollar Tree.
Trigger warnings: all the awful colonial racist violence I mentioned, murder (including of children), violence, racism, genocide, candid descriptions of body parts and bones from dead people and animals, cultural insensitivity and theft of "foreign" items for the museum, racist evolutionary ideas, inappropriate museum and archival/preservation practices
I went back to children's lit after this, reading two different picture books about libraries and books.
The Night Library by David Zeltser, illustrated by Raul Colón. This cute picture book has one of the famous New York Public Library lion statues coming to life at night and taking a little boy who doesn't like books to discover the magic of the public library. I liked the dreaminess of this one and its art. This is the sort of book I'd have pored over and loved as a child. Recommended for both children and adults, although if you read a lot like I do, the story is not unique. It also feels more like it should be a short film than a book. Supposedly the boy is latino; I did not pick up on that. Bonus diversity points, I guess? It was probably Raul Colón's doing. 3.5 stars, probably keeping. Source: Book Outlet.
Trigger warnings: can't think of any. Might make children think lions are safe to ride? They might also start throwing library books around to make them fly
Waiting for the Biblioburro by Monica Brown, illustrated by John Parra. This book is about a little girl in Colombia who has only one book and dreams of more. Luckily, her town is visited one day by the Biblioburro, a traveling library on the backs of two burros named Alfa and Beto (I cry. Get it, alfabeto? Alphabet?). The bright, colorful, naive-ish Latin American-inspired illustrations are nice to look at. The librarian with the Biblioburro is real; this is based on a true story. I enjoyed this, and it's nice to see a library-related picture book that is from Latin America. Both author and illustrator are latines. 3.5 stars, probably keeping. Source: Book Outlet.
Trigger warnings: hinted-at poverty, hinted-at educational neglect of children, suggested parentification of child, can't really think of anything else
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