The book would have been perfect at any time, in any age. Despite the nicely labelled dates (example: Saturday, June 7, 1986), it doesn’t feel stuck on any day of any month of any year. And this book is a not insignificant part of why I thought I’d really, really better go to NCTE back in November. I knew Scholastic would be there, and I just desperately wanted to see if I could talk to someone about how I could wheedle a review copy. Well, they just handed me a copy (and then I lost the card of the lovely person who gave me the copy, so I can’t email her this review– I’m bad at this! Sorry, lovely publicist.), so that part was easy.

What’s not easy is writing about it. I read it and my heart swelled and twisted so I wanted to cry. I made my husband read it. I re-read it. I tried and tried to write, and swore, and threw out drafts.

It’s difficult.

Danny, whose voice we hear for most of Run Away With Me, Brian Selznick’s new masterpiece (order from that link to Books of Wonder and you may get a signed copy), also struggles to speak sometimes. Angelo is the more loquacious of the two friends, young men finding each other in Rome. Angelo is the storyteller, but Danny, in his quiet way, elicits stories from Angelo and shares his own.

There is a manuscript, too, which is hidden and found, and the manuscript is in itself a hidden text, the secrets painstakingly unfolded by Danny’s mother, a paleographer.

Oh, yes, that’s right. There is paleography. My one potential quibble: the rare book librarians I know do not currently use white cotton gloves in handling books. Would they have in the 1980s? It’s certainly possible. I feel like Brian Selznick would have covered that in his extensive research. He’s such a thoughtful, careful creator. He doesn’t push books into being before they’re ready. He is eloquent, but not overly wordy. Like Maurice Sendak. Like Margaret Wise Brown. Like Sergio Ruzzier. Brian Selznick crafts his manuscripts deftly and considers them with care.

I flip through my heavily read and creased ARC of the book, and marvel at the work that went into each image and passage. Brian Selznick’s draft work must be art in its own right. I know it without seeing it.

But each of these elements shows the beauty of the silence between the words. As usual in a book by Brian Selznick, much of that silence is visual art, and much of that visual art is an unfolding mystery: connection, misdirection, and brilliant bridges across time and space. Is that one of the boys, maybe Angelo? No! That’s an angel in the church! Wait– no, the angel is Angelo? Or–

The text draws further deft lines between these links, and no I’m not going to explain any of the above, about Angelo or Danny or paleography or the angel in the church, because to do so would wreck your experience in following the delicate strokes of pencil and text, from scene to scene, drawing and description, music and flowing water.

Of all of Brian Selznick’s books, I think this may be his greatest masterpiece to date. I felt a strong pang of recognition in his depictions of aching loneliness and longing for beauty.

“They always seem lonely to me,” I said. “The obelisks.”
“They are lonely,” he answered, as if the objects themselves had been telling him their secrets.

Even when they have each other, Danny and Angelo are aware that the days are ticking down to separation. But Angelo has already told Danny: “To have had a friend,” he said. “Even for a short time. That’s important.”

I think this book will be a friend to many of us.

In November 2017, I wrote a not particularly good but, I recall, intensely felt post about The Wall by Peter Sís. I recall the fear and agitation of the time vividly, and, of course, not much has changed. Some things have, of course, but, ultimately, what I see and hear swirling around me is a kind of misery contest of who is the first under attack: “It always starts with–” fill in the blank with your pick of women, LGBT+ folks, racial minorities, the arts, the intellectuals, the judiciary, or what have you. Historically, it all does start somewhere and with something and someone, I’m absolutely certain, but depending on what “it” is and where you set the goalposts, that will always shift, and–

Truly, it doesn’t matter, because it has already started, and here we are. Trying to figure out when and where it started is, I submit with a marked lack of humility, futile. At this point, we simply need to stop hiding, stop obfuscating, and say: We are living under the shadow of a new fascism.

Instead of blindly running around trying to warn that this is leading somewhere bad, please consider that it already is very bad and that fracturing into splinters of arguments over who’s most under attack is absurd while there’s what Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic called “a Mack-truck-size breach” of security regarding war plans being discussed on Signal. EOs against law firms are putting a damper on lawyers, and while everyone loves to joke about sleazy lawyers and quote Shakespeare out of context, please recall that lawyers with the Department of Justice were methodically, thoroughly, and competently investigating and prosecuting January 6 insurrectionists, a fair number of whom had histories of violent conduct. These lawyers, who were upholding our rule of law and shoring up the integrity of our democracy in the face of an angry government, were fired for the very nature of their work, and the insurrectionists were pardoned.

Thus: this is a growing wave of totalitarian conduct.

And here I am, back to The Wall. And thank God Peter Sís created this masterpiece.

I don’t know a single person who has not, to some degree or other, been affected by this rising totalitarianism. My entire home country of Canada, for example. But also: teachers under scrutiny, scientists facing lost funding, friends with jobs lost or going to bed wondering if they’ll have a job tomorrow, or the biography of the guy who constructed the Sunday crossword noting that he just lost his job as a management consultant for federal agencies in Washington, DC. The maelstrom of chaos is, of course, deliberate, but comes into focus when seen not as a first step but as an accomplished act: totalitarian regimes are not clearly organized, they are incompetent, and discuss war plans on Signal.

I had been thinking of The Wall often, since I see the entire world through a lens of art. Literature, visual art, music: this is how humans have always processed our experiences, of course. The picture book is an ideal medium because it is so limited that the great creator is forced to hone the experience to a synthesized visual and verbal package with the rhythm of a poem when read aloud. I don’t mean that it must be in verse; rather that page turns create the marks of beats and accents of a poem. An ideal picture book works with that rhythm and the constraints of the page and format to distill an experience into a felt experience.

In The Wall, Peter Sís distills growing up under oppression, finding a secret voice, hiding it, and with wave on wave of growing pushes towards liberty from the Soviet regime, finally coming to freedom.

I pulled it from the shelf while fears for Ukraine rose in me, intending to read it to myself or handing it to the Changeling to read with me. She’s 11, and feeling this political climate more keenly than I’d like, but I think every parent has that uneasiness. I did not expect the 4-year-old ballet-loving, twirling Spriggan to ask me to read it to him. I had just heard about the Kennedy Center takeover; on our frequently watched DVD of Swan Lake with the Spriggan’s adored Angel Corella as Prince Siegfried, the performance is on the stage of the Kennedy Center and it opens with a clip from the dedication of the Kennedy Center. My love of the performing arts has deep roots, and one of the joys of my nuclear family is that my husband and children and I all share this taste. So that was back of my mind as we read The Wall.

This is not a book for a 4-year-old, and while he found it interesting and said he liked the art, he very sensibly went to look for other books by the same author that were more at his level, which are thankfully easily available on our shelves. One of my deepest objections to education in schools today is the rush, rush, rush away from picture books, but this is a book for older children, older classes, and families and teachers. It is perfect and it is beautiful, but classrooms and education haven’t kept pace with Peter Sís’s genius and tell children to grow out of picture books by the time they can read to themselves. And yet Grade 7 and 8 should read this.

America to the rescue! I broke down a bit on that one.

We are back to The Wall, and I can’t say what to do or how to function, but I would like to recommend: a) Cohesion rather than competition; b) Read good books, including this one; c) Don’t obscure reality. It doesn’t start with anyone; we are here.

Finally, some words from Jeffrey Goldberg when asked if he feared retaliation: “It’s not my role to care about the possibility of threats or retaliation. We just have to come to work and do our jobs to the best of our ability. Unfortunately, in our society today—we see this across corporate journalism and law firms and other industries—there’s too much preemptive obeying for my taste. All we can do is just go do our jobs.”

“I FOUND MY CALDECOTT PICK!” I shrieked on the way into my husband’s study and I think he was in a meeting but let’s pretend he wasn’t. I was excited.

I had been a bit apprehensive about Let’s Be Bees. I will confess: I was wrong.

I adore Shawn Harris for his whimsically odd approach to picture books, for breaking with orthodoxy in a rather Ruth Krauss-esque way: in Have You Ever Seen a Flower?, the child shouts “HELLO” just to listen for an echo, and something about it reminds me of the jubilant page: “Yell, ‘Good morning, big fat world!'” in Roar Like a Dandelion.

And I keep somehow being nervous with Shawn Harris titles before I see them. I think it’s the presentation of simplicity that deceives me; will it be too empty? I cannot emphasize strongly enough that this is sheer stupidity, probably trauma induced from reading too many breathlessly inane titles about loving the whole world. Shawn managed to write the only book with a tiny pink unicorn that made me laugh and that doesn’t make me foam at the mouth and that I have even gotten as a gift for multiple children.

NB: I routinely lecture adults about the taxonomically incorrect unicorns in books and the media these days. Like, you know, hot pink unicorns. I pull out history books and demonstrate that these are not accurate based on documentary evidence. That Shawn could create a pink unicorn I grudgingly like is nothing short of gobsmacking, and I need to trust to the truth:

Shawn Harris can be trusted with simple books.

You see, not everyone is good enough to do simple well. Above, I compared him to Ruth Krauss, famous for, among others, A Hole Is to Dig. She did something simple and brilliant: she listened to kids. In reading her books, often illustrated by Maurice Sendak, who matched her in his acute and sensitive level of observation and respect for children, one has the sense of tumbling into the world delineated there. The logic is intensely obvious. It cannot be imitated, however, because Ruth Krauss is the one who did the work. She was the observer. Any imitation is going to be cute and coy and patronizing, and I will feel like feeding the offending book to an angry hippopotamus. For example.

Shawn, like Ruth Krauss, does the work. In this interview with Betsy Bird (shared by a friend– thank you, Macy!) he says this thought was the starting point: “Well, that was fun becoming a flower— now I want to be everything else on earth.” That thought catapults straight into the mind of a 4-year-old, and I live with one. Yesterday he was a beaver and a black swan. Usually at different times.

I’ve seen his books described as “weird,” and from an adult perspective, I totally agree. It is absolutely bizarre to have a spread that’s bloodred, just bloody. But we had a guest over who cheerfully told us about his 7-year-old child nemesis who wiped her bloody finger on his cheek to prove to him that she really was bleeding, ok, you stupid grown-up? Blood is visceral, she felt it, she needed him to feel it. And Have You Ever Seen a Flower? really gets that. In Let’s Be Bees, it feels weird to a grown-up to be anything but human, because we’re pretty convinced that’s who we are, see? My experience of 4-year-olds leads me to believe that their species identities are entirely fluid at all times, and the book feels natural to read with one. They move with the shifts. We need a little push to our less elastic brains. It’s a little odd, see.

Look, I’m too wordy. Let me share my Spriggan’s perspective. He wasn’t really feeling like a tree the day we read it, and my attempts to get him to rustle were met with indifference. But we came to what I’m thinking of as “the ROAR spread” and he had a lot to tell me.

“Mama, you read it wrong.”
“What?” I was surprised, a bit, because so far I thought he couldn’t quite read yet, and usually he trusts me to get the words right in books.
“That isn’t a fire.”
“Uh…”
Allow me to show you the spread:

I really, really thought that was a picture of a roaring fire there on the bottom left, so I just kind of stared a bit. I do that an awful lot when a kid is telling me something, because, frankly, I’m so often at a complete loss until I get more clues. (To be honest with you, I think Shawn must be a lot smarter than I am; he seems to get it.)

“Mama, that’s a Firebird. Firebirds don’t roar.”
“Oh! What does the Firebird say?”
He thought. “…tinkle tinkle?”

He didn’t speak with conviction, and I was, I confess, pleased to have stumped him. He’s advanced a few other suggestions, but mostly he thinks it’s important to know that they have Golden Apple trees. When he’s a Firebird, he carries his own tree with Golden Apples around with him, so that’s a Firebird, do we really care what they say? He doesn’t– the Firebirds he knows are from the ballet, and don’t talk, they flutter their wings and pluck Golden Apples from the tree and they’re delicate but stronger than Kotschei the Deathless.

The genius of this book, and it is absolutely genius, it is serious genius, is that it is delightfully weird to the adult reader, and it is natural and delightful to the child reader. It’s a book to read together as a lap read, but it would also work as a classroom read. And I particularly love the cozy framing of it, so gentle, as an adult reading to a child– reading this very book, in fact. That gentle set in image frames the whole experience as a read-together, and puts the adult in the position of entering the child’s world. It is the adult saying, “Let’s be bees.” That imagery puts us, as adults, in the child’s park, and we are joining them in their logical centre.

For children, so often pushed to join us in ours, this is a rare experience. Ruth Krauss gave it to them, Sergio Ruzzier does today, and so does Shawn Harris. I think he’s great. And, Shawn, sorry I ever doubted you.

Let’s be swans!

And this book? This is it. This is my Caldecott pick.

Side note: I must give enormous thanks to the editor, Taylor Norman, for sending this for my Spriggan (who is a Black Swan today), and who dealt with my enthusiastic messages with forbearance.