Sometimes a book tumbles right in your lap when you need it. Or, rather, when you come home from a weekend trip, Holiday House has sent you a review copy and it’s on your doorstep just in time for bedtime.

It is unlikely to come as a surprise to my readers that my younger child, a singularly sweet-tempered boy who plans to dance with the Philadelphia Ballet (he’ll drive his log loader to work) and the Paris Opera Ballet (sans log loader), become a choreographer and then Artistic Director of a ballet company, and go on to become a bird catcher like Papageno, has a very vivid imagination.

This weekend was a challenge for my peaceful and cheerful child. He, a real Ferdinand by nature, who likes to sit “just quietly” and smell the flowers, unless he’s dancing, was staying with a fiercer child, who can do nothing but everything all at once, and whose imagination is strongly influenced by what they’re reading, watching, or playing.

My little dancing sprite sees things differently. A measuring tape is a Ball Python Number Snake. When a silver sugar bowl is Winnie-the-Pooh’s honey pot, that’s about as robustly normal as it gets in my house. To stay with a rigidly exact child with a hot temper was hard for a child who believes very seriously that he was from Saturn before he was born (and has a narrative to explain it all), and my boy stood up quietly for his viewpoint, but had a hard time.

So it was very reassuring to him to come back to The Great Frog by Katie Palazzola.

Why?

This book is a merger of differences, and they are two types that coexist in most children; truly, in most humans, but children matter most, especially in literature for children.

One is the real. The other is the true.

Two children are looking at frog eggs. The big sister, Kit, knows about frog eggs and the stages of development. The little brother, Peedie, is a curious little fellow prodding with a stick. His sister explains, and tells him the story of the Great Frog who protects all little frogs and rides a horse called Tarnation. Peedie is fascinated and believes every word. The story grows in the telling, as stories do, until Kit sighs and confesses she made it all up because she thought he’d like the story.

Peedie, who may as well be my son, they’re like as two peas in a pod or frog eggs in a pond, replies, “Lots of true things are stories.”

Initially, I wasn’t sure I’d like this book. (Thank you, Holiday House, for sending me a copy of a book I was hesitating to order in for myself!) The kids have those sticky-out loop ears in the art that set my teeth on edge. But when I put my hand on the cover and look only at the Great Frog on Tarnation, I see the way there are two kids, two views, two arts, two stories, and they come together on each page. I am, simply, on Team True rather than Team Real. I believe that in fairy tales there is a truth beyond reality. Rafael and Vermeer and Holbein painted who people are rather than what they may have really looked like photographically. The image of the Great Frog on Tarnation called me; the cover image of the kids didn’t attract me in the same way. (Overall, the art was a mixed bag for me, but I loved the skyscapes, pond, the kids sprawled on the ground, and seeing Kit put acorn caps on her fingertips.)

Kit, loving big sister, sees this truth in her little brother even if she doesn’t see the truth in the Great Frog. I see it in my big girl and little boy. And I see the truth and beauty in my friend’s gorgeous, rigidly hot-tempered kid, too.

But I could see my dancing sprite of a boy’s eyes light up when Peedie declared, “There should be a looker-after for everything little,” and I knew that an idea had taken root, just like an acorn sprouting.

What a lovely book. And what perfect timing.

Per the OED:

Banal: Commonplace, common, trite; trivial, petty

It’s rather a late word, borrowed from the French, and came to English in the 1830s, which was rather a surprise to me.

I love a surprise. Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters by Yevgenia Nayberg was a surprise.

I will put myself on the chopping book by confessing I do not, on the whole, care for graphic novels, especially those from North America.¹ And, on top of that, I’m not fond of gritty memoirs from painful time periods, self-indulgent navel-gazing, and grim realism.

But, for some reason, I love the unflinching realism of this graphic novel memoir by Yevgenia Nayberg, set during the Chernobyl disaster, and coolly facing everything from the antisemitism of unspoken quotas to the deliberate government lies and disinformation during a nuclear disaster.

Why?

I received this as an ARC several months ago and have read it, I would guess, at least a dozen times since then, struggling with this very question. The easy way out of the question is to say that while, yes, it’s grim and realistic, Genya is a very funny narrator, and, yes, it’s a graphic novel but the art isn’t exactly typical, so it’s ok– in a nutshell, Yevgenia Nayberg does a very good job, so I can handle it.

But I do not like easy answers. They are commonplace, trite. Banal.

I want to push into why this book succeeds as a book, and at least part of the reason is that it lives in a place of intense self-interrogation, including of form. But it doesn’t say so.²

The narrated text lives in a jarring tension: the space between Genya’s mind as known in the past and the narrator’s memory of the past is not always distinct in the text, but the fuzziness is precise, there for a reason. It reflects the very things “adults don’t say,” the unspoken words of life in the Soviet Union. Genya both declares internally (“Did she ever say it aloud?” my mind wonders) “I want to be banal!” and remembers, as the narrator today, the feeling of desire to be ordinary, conforming to the world of her peers. But we don’t know how much she expressed openly in this oddly sequestered world.

Nayberg’s realism is a truth beyond the bland precision of a row of neatly rimmed panels with saturated colours. In her art, past and present run up against each other in rimless panels, oddly scribbly or misty backgrounds, and slightly eccentric figures with elongated lines, dramatic poses, and at times gorgeously grotesque proportions. Her figures at times recall Modigliani, especially in the curve of a neck here, the tilt of a head there, the shape of an eye glancing to the side.

The art pulls you out of your own sense of realism and says, “This is a different world. This is Genya’s space.”

In this world, you never know what you’ll meet on the next page: “And then there are the war survivors that never quite survived.” The line is on a vividly green background, a beautifully alive page followed by a dreary, half-dead page after the turn. The jarring impact of life against death (“What is survival?” I wonder) rattles the reader.

There are no simple answers. Genya must not be banal. We know this, she knows this. Except that, in order to get into art school, she must conform. Then she can do whatever real art she likes. Another jarring contrast. And, of course, only if she can get to the art school entrance test through the radiation and then pass it.

What is realism, in all this? Reality was, at the time of Chernobyl, so odd that it seems unreal. And Yevgenia Nayberg’s true genius is that of an artist who does not conform to the banal expectation of explication. She records it from her narrative memory, Genya then and now, in all the distortions that she experienced it, without simplification and without apology. It really was that strange a world.

What if it still is?

1. The Belgians and French do it better, of course. I cut my graphic novel teeth on Goscinny and Uderzo, today I love Catherine Meurisse, and I make no apology for being a snob. I like what I like. ↩︎
2. Except in the author’s note at the back, which I almost wish weren’t there. Only I kind of like it, so I don’t know. Notes from the author seldom add much, since a good book needs no apology. But since it’s been published already, it can stay. ↩︎