This is my third whack at writing this and by God I will post this today. I absolutely refuse to let war take more comfort and beauty from us, and, come hell and/or high water, I will post this review before the book is released, which is tomorrow. First things first, then: the book is The Little Books of the Little Brontës by Sara O’Leary and Briony May Smith, and you can just skip everything else here and take my word for it that you really, really want to go buy this book from your local indie, or from mine, and I ever so kindly supplied the link. Now, two paragraphs about the bitter crap, referenced yesterday, too, in my post here, or you can skip down and read the review.

A few notes about the Situation of All Things. I’ve been coping with a lot– well, I could leave it at that, couldn’t I? I think it’s true of many of us. This is my primary “place I write things” on the internet, but I should let you know that I do, in fact, have other places I appear. Notably, these days, I review Jewish books over at Kolture, which I link to as a whole due to the wide variety of excellent stuff there, but you can search for the Children’s Bookroom and find me. Once upon a time I was on a little site called Twitter which was ultimately acquired in a positively presidential tantrum by a poor fellow who was very annoyed people were saying mean things about him, but after he broke the site, I did a bit of soul-searching and realized something: I only ever joined any social media account because I felt an obligation to the publishers who sent me review copies and, above all, to the authors and illustrators (such as Sara O’Leary and Briony May Smith down below this paragraph– I promise I’m getting to you!) to give them easy ways to share my reviews telling people the books are good. What that means, and I swear I’m not only this dense, is that I feel this is professional. (I honest to God am not always this stupid, but yes this only just dawned on me.) So, I started an Instagram account I’ll tell you about (I’ll add a nice linky button on the main page, too, when I get to it, but here it is in the post): find me @childrensbookroom on Instagram, and here’s a link that’s supposed to take you there if you do use Instagram…

• Instagram

… and it’s actually been fun to just post pictures of review copies, random books I love, so it’s a bit of additional stuff about kids’ books, if that’s your cup of tea. And I guess that takes me from the Musk world to the Gawd-help-us Zuckerberg world. Well, ultimately, as I said: this is my home base, so this is where I’m all dug in, and you will always find me here, with lots of bookish things. This is the home of “Deborah seeking excellence in children’s literature,” and I do not intend to change that.

To the book! I’m going to be blunt about this one: I’ve been excited about this book since it was a scintilla of an idea mentioned by the author on what-was-Twitter-at-the-time, back when that website was still a mostly reliably useful place to get publishing news, not that I’m bitter. I recall Sara O’Leary mentioning that she thought it would be fun to do a book on the little books the Brontë children used to make. I think one of Charlotte Brontë’s little books was up for sale at the time (it ultimately went, as it ought, to the Parsonage), and there was a flurry of excitement. I responded with, I’m certain, my usual level of articulate encouragement (“Dear God, you have got to write that,” or some level of equally embarrassing burbling through the keyboard at an innocent author).

I was, therefore, lucky to notice and receive periodic updates that the book was happening: there was a deal, a title, an illustrator, a release date, and, finally, a review copy (which my daughter tried to steal; not unusual, but I did, I admit, demand first reader’s rights to this one). And this is the book! The Little Books of the Little Brontës by Sara O’Leary and Briony May Smith, a perfect match of author and illustrator.

I’m not sure where to begin with this, except that I want you to trust me that this is a book you and your family and your school and your library and your class and your friends need.

I have written a few times now about books that feel completely honest and say more than the words on the page. Sara O’Leary, in particular, exemplifies this in large part by her trust to her illustrators, and Briony May Smith more than proved herself trustworthy in this book, meaning that the book is charged, in the interplay of text and art, with vigour, beauty, and imagination. (I’m a little gutted this one won’t be eligible for the Caldecott due to residency rules, but I’m interested to watch myriad other awards– this is a winner.)

The basic, underlying truth of this book is that children love small books. (I kind of hope that a tiny companion book comes out, Tundra? Or tiny notebooks for Christmas gifts?) This is known, it’s not a mystery. Think of Beatrix Potter and the small size she advocated for when she wrote Peter Rabbit, and think of The Nutshell Library. The size was the point, for that. But have you never seen children making their own small books? It’s such a common game among the imaginative set.

Interesting personal story: I’ve twice done a “make your own picture book” class for groups of children. I make them each a dummy book for page layout before they create the final book. The students are always, always enchanted by the tiny dummy book. They’re excited to do the final book because it’s their book, of course. But they squeal over the little dummy book.

Sara O’Leary takes us back in time and shows us that children have always been children, and tells the child who loves to make a small book today that they’re not alone and have companions in storytelling. I felt very much that she was talking to me approximately 28 years ago. (Sara, would you very much mind nipping back 28 years to tell me then that I’d be able to talk to a real live author in the future? It would mean an awful lot.)

Now, this is not the first Brontë-world book I’ve written about. I’m shocked to see that The Glass Town Game was published six years ago (it still feels like yesterday to me), but these two books really feel partnered in my mind: They are the books of an author who loves another author and wants to share the secret heart of what makes the books magical with a new generation. “Here, this is the glorious soul of my beloved books; I’m giving you a gift.”

In The Glass Town Game, Catherynne M. Valente wanted to share the worlds the Brontë children lived in: their characters, their games, their gloriously vivid imaginings. The Little Books of the Little Brontës is similar in many ways, but, speaking to a younger audience, it reaches to a more basic level of sharing. Charlotte is making Anne a little book. My Changeling has made the Spriggan many little books, which, of course, we keep as carefully as we can while also letting the Spriggan hug and enjoy and destroy them– it’s a bit of a process. Any child in that zone between my two will be caught by this picture book of story-hungry children hiding and running and playing and then writing their little books between themselves. “The books they write are tiny, but the worlds inside them are huge,” Sara O’Leary writes. If that doesn’t make the kid on your lap light up with recognition, I’m not sure what will.

(I normally balk at backmatter, I really prefer to let a book stand on its own– but who can resist the “How to Make Your Own Little Book” at the back of this one?)

And it’s not just the text. It’s not even just Briony May Smith’s illustrations in the book, though they are active and calm and evocative of the Parsonage and the moors… It’s the book as a book. I do have pictures of under the dust jacket and of the endpapers but I’m not sharing them because I want you to go buy the book and look for yourself, touch the cover yourself! Although the book isn’t tiny, it feels somehow private. The endpapers feel like a scrap of wallpaper the children might have found and used for a cover. The cover under the dustjacket feels like a Victorian cameo, almost.

What is it about the Brontës as a topic? The Glass Town Game also felt like an intimate read, just for me. My daughter, when she read it, felt just the same, and played at being Emile Brontë for a week or so. Now, here we have another Brontë book, and it also feels intimate, lovely, and just perfect for a cozy read followed by, perhaps, accidentally leaving a bunch of nice scrap paper where a child could find it.

Watch this space for a giveaway. Books like these are to be shared, giving children that space to see the hugeness of the worlds inside them recognized on the page, so they’ll set them down on other pages, whether small or large.

For crying out loud, I have two draft book reviews sitting while the world burns and I will get them out next week, but right now I have a thing to say. Apparently, from the ferocity with which everyone is posting everything right now, so does everyone else. While everyone else is suddenly an expert in geopolitics and religion and ethics– I’m sticking to what, to be quite clear, I arrogantly believe I’m an expert in: books for kids.

For Jews right now, times are scarier than they’ve ever been in my lifetime, and let’s also be candid and acknowledge that for a wide variety of other people times are scary and bewildering, too; but those are not my worlds and while each of you who is scared and bewildered has my sympathy, I’m not speaking to what I don’t know.

Now, when times are scary, the instinct for many parents is to look for resources. Frequently, those resources are external. Why? We so often need something to “start the conversation” or “help show something I’m not expert about.” Today, doing French storytime at my wonderful library, I asked one of the excellent children’s librarians (and the Brookline Public Library has a stellar team) whether they’d had parents checking in about the situation in Israel and Gaza. “Parents are definitely looking for books on Israel. Do you have thoughts?” Well, honestly, I’m not sure she was asking that last question I jumped in so fast. “There’s only one book they need, and it’s not about Israel,” I told her, “it’s The Woman Who Turned Children into Birds.“

And I’m going to tell you what I told her and what I’ve told others:

Books for children on Israel, Palestine, anything supposedly relevant to this situation which is not so much “complicated” as people are delicately saying, but impassioned, ugly, bitter, scary, heroic, and an intensely messy morass of overwhelming feelings, are utterly irrelevant to what’s going on. You will not find the information you need in books for children, because, first of all, the information does not exist, and, second, the conversation you want to open with them is about the messy morass of overwhelming feelings, not about the geopolitics.

Let me unpack that. The information doesn’t exist because what adults want is someone to sort out “the situation” so it can be simple on the page. Ibrahim X. Kendi could write The Antiracist Baby because, honestly, that’s a pretty simple concept: there’s systemic racism in the world and it’s not enough to acknowledge that passively, we must actively combat it. All of that is in that board book. (I do not love it as a board book, too many words, but it doesn’t avoid a single thing and it’s pitched right for a child older than board book age.) Books on Israel and Palestine avoid a huge amount. Please look at my review of Homeland, probably the most recent picture book relating to the region from a mainstream publisher, and you will see that even back then I was saying the same thing: I was looking for more openess, and, I presume, the author felt a good deal more than she wrote down. Now, the situation in Gaza is not simple, and if you think it is, you’re wrong– and with that statement I offended at least one reader who passionately supports the people of Gaza and one reader who passionately supports the Israelis, right now, before I got to the period of the sentence. Bam, I proved my point. You can’t write a picture book while you are trying to avoid that truth. I italicize that because I think it is absolutely possible to write that picture book, but first you have to admit that you have to accept the morass of feelings involved. To be blunt, publishing today will not risk that. (Dear publishers: prove me wrong, I beg you.)

To my second point, the conversation you need to open is about the messy morass of overwhelming feelings, not about the geopolitics. Why? That’s the part we parents don’t want to deal with, and where we need the support! If we were ok with that, we could totally handle sharing the geopolitical scenario with no problem. We’re overwhelmed with feelings, we’ve been crying in the shower so they won’t hear us! Well, with my earnest sympathy because I, too, have cried in the shower so I wouldn’t be heard, stop that. Kids know something scary is going on and will be imbibing your fear and anxiety but not the tools to cope with those feelings; help them get the tools by facing the fear.

I recommended, above, The Woman Who Turned Children Into Birds by David Almond and Laura Carlin for good reason. When Nanty Solo comes to town, the adults are terrified of this strange woman who turns children into birds. The children are warned away and they want her to leave. The children, however, long to fly and, strange to tell, prohibitions don’t work– they go to her anyway. The adults are horrified and Nanty Solo says, “But what on earth are you frightened of?” (Orthodox Jews don’t get tattoos, but if I ever had one, it would be of those words.) Ultimately, the adults do join the children, and oh they all have the glorious freedom of the sky.

Isn’t that it? All of it, all in one glorious experience of reading with a child on your lap and beautiful art to match? And, snuggled together, you can whisper that you’ve been afraid, that you have friends you fear for, family you love, and you wish they could fly.

I promise you, after that, I believe that you know what your kids are ready to hear about the geopolitics, and I trust you to share that. I will, of course, disagree with you on some points. The situation in Gaza, after all, is not simple or it would have been resolved long ago.

The good thing about this is that any book that is honest, emotionally honest, will help you. Are you angry? Where the Wild Things Are is all anger and heart and the raw passion of gnashing teeth and rolling eyes. Are you feeling either that you wish you could open your home and your heart to everyone in pain (The Mouse Who Carried His House on His Back) or thinking more about the instability of homes in the world at all (The Shelter)? Or maybe you’re finding that you’re feeling really out of place wherever you are, you’re trapped in a wrong place and words are all wrong– you feel… I Talk Like a River. (And, by the way, if you’re thinking, “No! I can’t do that! Or I do feel no I don’t but I can’t–!” then read these to yourself first and maybe think about seeking help for you right now.)

And do you know what else is good? These books will help with everything else, too. The situation in this world, humans with other humans, is not simple, or else we’d have been living in harmony long ago. I trust you to share this with your kids. But don’t look for single-serving books about a thing; look to share the honest, raw beating heart inside, and only extraordinary, pulsing books can help you there.

I still think, often, of the beautiful event for Big Tree I got to attend at the Brookline Booksmith. Ever since, sycamores have held a particularly special place in my heart. Which is why this bit of news from the UK really hurt: a 300-year-old sycamore tree near Hadrian’s Wall was cut down.

Soon after reading of that, I saw the announcement of this excellent website to go along with Big Tree: Click here for stories and science and so much more.

And I just want to encourage everyone, whether you’ve already read the book or not, to give thought to how long three hundred years really is, how short a time it takes to cut down those years, how the years lost won’t come back, and how we can grow to feel awe through art and literature.