The Council of Frogs

 
 
The Council of Frogs

by Matt Emmons
Second at Best Press

2023
 
  
The Council of Frogs is a fantasy comic by Matt Emmons. It's set in the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic future, but events are unquestionably guided by magic, rather than science. A tiny little frog goes out into a hostile world to deliver a message to a warlock for the sake of his community.

Generations ago, a war-mage died in battle, and his corpse sank into a bog ... then returned to unlife as a lich. His magic also fused with a purse of frogs' eggs; they became his children, unable to speak but imbued with intelligence. Now he's reaching the end of his unlife, and sends one frog as a messenger to ask the warlock to take over his duties as the frogs' guardian.
 
Our little messenger sets out on a quest to find the warlock. Along the way he encounters dangers in the form of hungry birds and human knights and war-mages. He's aided by a beast-man, an oracle, and eventually by the warlock too. Each of those three initially seem dangerous, and Emmons gives the little frog an expressive face that shows his fear. In each case, it kind of seems like they might be trying to win his trust so they can trick him ... but then no, they all turn out to be as honest and helpful as they initially said. No one who's actually hostile bothers lying to the frog; they just immediately attempt to eat him or stomp him underfoot. 
 
Something about this plotting choice bothers me, although I can't quite say what. Maybe it's just the contrast with the knee-jerk stranger danger of the media I grew up with? Over the Garden Wall also has characters who look scary, but whose protestations of innocence prove true, but somehow the depiction of the world as fundamentally less dangerous than it seems rings more true in OTGW. In The Council of Frogs, the world is in tatters, and human supremacists aim to kill or subjugate anyone who's unlike them. In that context, it's important for those others to trust each other and form coalitions for safety, but I feel like Emmons make that look easier than it should be.
  
Emmons portrays the world as a wasteland where medieval technology mingles with the last remnants of the old society. The frog meets the beast-man (who will eventually become his closest ally) near an oil pipeline. The oracle (who tells the way to the warlock) has four arms, two of them obviously robotic. The warlock himself is either a robot or wears futuristic plate armor. The knights and war-mages are armored as well, but their outfits are more obviously medieval. In the end, the lich does find a successor and passes on his magic to a new guardian, though not the one he initially expects.

The Tea Dragon Tapestry

 
 
The Tea Dragon Tapestry

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2021

 

  

The Tea Dragon Tapestry is the third and last of K O'Neill's tea dragon books. O'Neill has grown quite notably as an artist and a storyteller across the trilogy, and I think this is their best work. Tapestry is a direct sequel to the original Tea Dragon Society, although these's a brief cameo by a couple characters introduced in the prequel Tea Dragon Festival.

 

In each of the the tea dragon books, O'Neill pairs someone who's young and getting ready to move into a more professional stage of life with someone who's burned out from too much work, who's trying to heal and reconnect with themselves. O'Neill sees friendships between these two types of people as mutually beneficial, the younger one reminding the older of what they used to be like, the older one helping the younger navigate the confusing first steps of a career. The fussy little tea dragons play a role in this relationship by forcing both parties to get out of their own heads, to engage with the world, and to take care of something that needs them.

 

In Tapestry, we rejoin Greta who wants to be a blacksmith and Minette who used to be a prophet and now works in a tea shop. Greta has learned blacksmithing from her mother and gotten pretty good. She's ready for a new teacher to help her continue to grow. One of the retired adventurers who runs the tea shop sent one of Greta's spoons to the master blacksmith who used to make their adventuring swords. Now he's come to town to test Greta to see if she's ready.

 

Minette found a tapestry she started but never finished when she was a prophet, and starts having strange, symbolic dreams. I think probably for anyone who's had one career, and had to leave it, there's a sense of shame or failure around what you left behind and why you left it. Minette's task will be to accept that chapter of her life, and to recognize that she's happy where she is now, that she has friends, community.

 

Greta needs to decide what to make to demonstrate her skill. She's also worried about her tea dragon, Ginseng, who is not actually fussy, but instead in mourning after the death (from old age) of its previous caretaker. Meanwhile, the master blacksmith reveals to his old friends the tea shop owners that he's been burned out at work, hasn't taken a new student in awhile, and is thinking of just shutting down his forge. For the test, Greta makes a present for Ginseng to let it know she'll wait as long as it needs to recover from its grief. The gift also touches the heart of the master blacksmith, who sees something he hadn't thought of before, and feels inspired to keep smithing. He also decides that, instead of asking Greta to return to his forge, he'll settle here for awhile and reconnect with his old friends.

 

Across all three books, O'Neill has offered a defense of working slowly, making things of quality, making time to spend with friends and pets, and being patient with oneself because all these things take time. This isn't just a list of different tasks; O'Neill clearly sees them as interconnected. Artisan work is a way to avoid burnout, because it's a way of working that lets you savor what you like about your job without using you up. New friendships need not only be with people at the same stage of life, but can be between people who are in some sort of transition, and can support each other, no matter what they're moving from or to. And as I said, that thesis is expressed more clearly in Tea Dragon Tapestry than I think it has been before.

The Tea Dragon Festival

 
 
The Tea Dragon Festival

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2019

 

 

The Tea Dragon Festival is sort of a prequel to K O'Neill's Tea Dragon Society. The older gay couple who serve as mentors in Society are young men here, still active as fantasy adventurers and bounty hunters, not yet settled down as tea shop owners or tea dragon enthusiasts. I think we may see the moments when Erik and his boyfriend Hesekiel decide what they eventually want to do when they retire, but it's not a pivotal moment in the story, just a conversation we see them have near the end of the book. A lot of O'Neill's storytelling is like this. The pace is slow, the plot is minimal, and key moments of characterization are so brief and so gentle that you only recognize their importance in retrospect. 
 
Erik and Hesekiel are the only recurring characters, and the tea dragons - who are the only other connection between Society and Festival - play a very minor role this time around. The stars this time are Rinn, who is Erik's 'nibling', a term that's the nonbinary counterpart to nephew or niece, and Aedhan, a dragon in humanoid form who's just woken up from almost a century of magical slumber. Rinn is an aspiring cook who really excels at foraging for mushrooms in the forest. They live in a fairly isolated village (though it does have a train station), and they find Aedhan sleeping in a ruined shrine. Aedhan was sent by their dragon clan to be the village guardian, and he's shocked when he realizes how much time has passed.
 
We follow Rinn as they show Aedhan around the village and take him on a foraging trip. Erik and Hesekiel are visiting in pursuit of a bounty on an ancient spirit that puts people to sleep. 
 
We see Rinn and Aedhan become friends, and possible develop the beginnings of a romance. I know Rinn is nonbinary because the four main characters get one-sentence biographies at the front of the book. No one ever uses a pronoun for them in the actual text, though you could probably read the book without noticing. The closest we get to explicit acknowledgment is Erik calling Rinn nibling, and a brief exchange where Rinn asks Aedhan is it's true that some dragons are skilled enough shapeshifters to not only change between humanoid and dragon form, but to also change between male and female forms, and when Aedhan says yes that's true, Rinn says that sounds nice. Without the bio at the beginning, I don't know if I would've read that as an expression of Rinn's identity, as opposed to like, Rinn being impressed by how cool dragons are. Aedhan's admiration for Rinn's mushroom hunting gives them the courage to keep cooking as a hobby instead of a career, and to focus more pn foraging. (K O'Neill has come out as nonbinary since this book was originally published, which makes me wonder if Rinn is at all a representation of the author.)
 
Erik and Hesekiel find the ancient spirit. It puts them to sleep, and they dream of the forest as it was in the magic-filled days of the ancient past, a place of awe-inspiring beauty. The two manage to wake up, but decide the spirit doesn't understand human lifespans and isn't trying to hurt anyone, so they politely ask it to stop. They seem to think this will work, and I guess the audience is meant to as well. Since they didn't capture the spirit, they won't collect a bounty - I think this is the turning point that leads them to think forward to their eventual retirement from adventuring, decades hence.
 
The last thing that happens is the titular tea dragon festival. The handful of tea dragons in the village are like communal pets. The mountain chamomile dragon is very fluffy and adorably grumpy looking. For the festival, they get dressed up with ribbons, and the villagers eat a feast and drink tea. Rinn shares some tea-dragon tea with Aedhan, which shows him some memories of village life that help relieve his guilt about his delayed start to being a guardian, and kind of affirms his friendship with Rinn.
 
There's a deck-building board game based on the tea dragon books, where each player has a tea dragon and tries to give them the most fulfilling experiences while reigning in their misbehavior. (They're very cat-like.) The game has two versions, one based solely on The Tea Dragon Society and one based on both Society and Festival, and the second version is probably better. It's more intuitive, has fewer turns where it feels like you can't do anything, and just generally seems to capture the intended play experience better. I think The Tea Dragon Festival is the same way. O'Neill seems better able to tell the kind of story they want here, to tell a stronger version of the same sort of coming-of-age tale about a young person deciding on their career befriending someone just returning to society after a debilitating magical illness, helped by mentors, and needing to give help to the fussy little tea dragons. 

The Tea Dragon Society

 
 
The Tea Dragon Society

by K O'Neill

Oni Press

2017 

 

 

The Tea Dragon Society is a cute little graphic novel about a group of people in a fantasy setting who are involved in what seems like is their world's equivalent of slow food - raising tiny fussy dragons that grow tea leaves out of their heads, and brewing and drinking the magic tea made from those leaves.
 
Our viewpoint character is Greta, a young goblin learning blacksmithing from her mother. Greta notes that it takes a long time to make anything this way, but her mom assures her that there will always be people who value things that are well-made by hand. This is probably as close as the book gets to a thesis. One day at the market, Greta spots a little tea dragon being chased by dogs and rescues it. Someone in the market directs her to the dragon's owner, Hezekiel, an old man who looks like a dragon himself. He invites Greta to cone back some time to learn more about tea dragons. He's glad she's interested, since it's a dying art.
 
On successive trips to the tea shop Hesekiel runs, Greta bonds with Jasmine, the little dragon she rescued; meets and befriends Minette, a girl about her age who used to be a seer as a child, but effectively got burnout and amnesia from overwork, who's caring for the tea dragon Chamomile, and Erik, a retired adventurer and Hesekiel's partner, who now uses a wheelchair due to an old adventuring injury. There's not much plot beyond the group getting to know each other.

The whole story kind of takes place at the margins of a traditional fantasy world. Blacksmithing and tea-selling seem to generate enough income to finance a slow-paced life that accommodates Erik's and Minette's disabilities, and seems to suit the temperamental little tea dragon pets. I feel like it's more-or-less explicitly stated that artisanally-produced luxury goods can command high enough prices to avoid needing to hustle, grind, or suffer deprivation. (Yes, I know I shouldn't look to children's books for sound economics. And, I mean it IS sound, if you can find the customers. Just ask the restaurateurs who make a nice living by serving a couple dozen customers a day and charging them my entire week's wages for a single meal!)
 
The tea dragons are silent, which I think suits the mood and tone of the book. A lot is communicated wordlessly through the art, especially when the characters share tea and see visions of someone's memories thanks to the dragons' magic. There are four chapters plus an epilogue, and really only one main scene per chapter. The pace is as slow and gentle as the characters and their crafts. The dragons appear to live a very quiet, cozy life, and their caretakers also seem to enjoy a relaxed pace and schedule.
 
There's a bit of lore at the back of the book about tea dragons and their magic, which might inspire kid readers to make up their own tea dragon stories, or perhaps incorporate some of the ideas from the book into playing house or having tea parties.

Shady Hollow

 
 

Shady Hollow

by Juneau Black

Vintage

2022 

 

 

Shady Hollow feels both brilliant and inevitable, because what author Juneau Black has done is to take the plot conventions of a classic cozy mystery and place it in the setting of a contemporary cozy video game, like the Animal Crossing series. It makes perfect sense, because both already take place in the same sort of environment - an isolated small town where everyone knows everyone, and where there usually isn't any real hardship or trouble. What separates Shady Hollow from other cozy mysteries is that all the characters are lightly-anthropomorphized animals.
 
I want to note briefly that Juneau Black is the singular pen name of a pair of authors working together, like James SA Corey or Lewis Padgett. This isn't a secret; they explain it in the preface and pose together for the author photo at the back of the book.
 
So, Shady Hollow is a little town tucked away in the northern woods. (I love the double meanings of the word 'shady' here.) The town borders a river, and its chief industry is the wood mill owned the the industrialist von Beaverpelt family. The town has a newspaper, a thriving coffee shop run by a moose (or perhaps a caribou?), a bookshop run by a raven, and a new vegetarian restaurant run by a recently immigrated panda. The police are bears, the usual suspect is a raccoon, the college professor's an owl, and most of the townsfolk seem to be mice, rabbits, etc, wild animals, the kind that usually live in forests. So "A Murder in Richard Scarry's Busytown" remains an available concept to any copyright-courageous writer wanting to turn Black's insight into a subgenre.
 
We start with an introduction to the cast of main characters, written to cast suspicion on absolutely everyone, a map of the town, and then we're off to the races, when the hummingbird gossip columnist spots a dead body floating in the mill pond - the grumpy old toad who lived by the pond and liked to argue with everyone. Aspiring star reporter Vera Vixen picks up the story, determined to both report the news and solve the mystery! She talks to the other townsfolk to try to understand the victim and his relationships. Meanwhile the murderer isn't idle. Someone else is attacked, and then Vera becomes a target herself...
 
The concept of using animal characters gives Black permission to make them all a bit simplified in a way that works well for the story. The dynamic between Vera and her boss, for example, reminds me of Lois Lane and Perry White, or Mary Tyler Moore and Ed Asner. Not flat, but archetypal, iconic. Each character has only a few traits, so you feel like you get to know them quickly, including some of their secrets. This is not a dense or difficult book, it's a page-turner, and at just 200 pages, a quick, enjoyable read.
 
I honestly appreciated that the solution to the mystery was relatively straightforward. There was no locked-room puzzle to untangle, and unlike a couple mystery miniseries I watched recently, no too-clever implausible twist at the end. The answer is grounded in the relationships between the relevant characters that Vera and the audience discover together.
 
Black is also quite careful and playful with language. The townsfolk are 'creatures,' never 'people,' never even 'women' or 'men.' There are 'pawkerchiefs' and folks considering things 'on the one paw,' but never any 'hands' or 'feet.' There are a few little puns and other language jokes, especially in the bookstore, but not so many that they dominate. The snake medical examiner talksss like thisss, but only gets a handful of lines. It's funny without bring overwhelming, a neat balance.
 
As I was reading, I found that the way I imagined the characters shifted between various visual inspirations. At times, I imagined them like the stop-motion puppets from Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox movie. Other times I pictured them looking like Hannah Barbara cartoons, like Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, and so on. The racoon I kept imagining as the vagabond from the boardgame Root; the sheep I pictured as Lambchop. And once, when the bear police detective picks up an injured Vera to help her to safety and her heart flutters with romantic excitement, I saw them as Little John and Maid Marian from Disney's foxy Robin Hood. It made me wonder how the authors imagined their own characters, and how other readers picture them.
 
Using the same rhyming logic employed here, of combining genres because they share a word in common, it's easy enough to imagine a cozy catastrophe with a cast of talking animals. For all I know, that'll be Juneau Black's next project. But I'm curious if anyone's ever mashed up the cozy mystery and cozy catastrophe, and had an amateur sleuth poking around a murder in the one town that's miraculously unaffected while the rest of the world succumbs to an off-camera apocalypse?

Imelda and the Goblin King

 
 
Imelda and the Goblin King

by Briony May Smith

Flying Eye Books

2015

 

 

Imelda and the Goblin King is a children's picture book that retells an older fairy tale in a way that seems an awful lot like a modern political allegory. I didn't really care for this one! The reasons for that probably have more to do with me, and with when I read it, than they do with what Briony Smith has written and drawn. But so be it; right now I don't know how to give Imelda a fair reading.
 
Imelda is a human girl. She lives in a house on the edge of the forest, and spends all day every day in the forest playing with the fairies and the Fairy Queen. One day, the Goblin King comes stomping into the woods with all his little goblins, declares that he owns everything, kicks some fairies, and generally makes an un-ignorable nuisance of himself. The Fairy Queen invites him to a shared banquet to smooth tensions. He eats everything, then kidnaps her and locks her in a cage.
 
The fairies go to Imelda and beg her for help. She bakes a magic pie that's half safe and half poison, and offers to share a (safe) slice with him if he'll release the Fairy Queen. Predictably, the Goblin King steals the pie from Imelda, eats the whole thing, and turns into a worm. Without the king, all the little goblins become friends with the fairies, and everyone lives happily ever after, except for the very angry, bossy worm.
 
Like I said, this feels like a parable. You've got a woman politician going up against a shouting megalomaniac who wants everyone to pay attention to him, who wants to own everything, control everyone, who wants to lock up women in cages. Smith published this in 2015, thus probably wrote it in 2014, and also probably wasn't making the overt parallels to American politics that seem so obvious now.
 
As a political fable, I hate it. It's too simplistic - which, I know, is laughable criticism of a kids' book, but still. Everyone is happy and gets along until the Goblin King arrives. The moment he's gone, they do again, with absolutely no conflict between the fairies and the goblins. And how do you get rid of an opposing politician you don't like? Imelda's answer is, effectively, assassination.
 
But even as a kids' book with no larger implications, I don't like this. The message that it's important to stand up to bullies instead of appeasing them is sound, but I kind of don't think you should encourage kids to poison their enemies - a real thing it is actually possible for them to do! 'But if he hadn't stolen the poisoned food, he wouldn't have gotten sick' is typical kid logic, and may even appeal to some adult sense of fairness, but I assure you our legal system doesn't see it that way.
 

I had the same complaint about the movie Brave. Merida is justified in not wanting an arranged marriage. But her solution is to find a witch, buy poison from her, and then use that poison on her mother. For all she knows, the poison will kill her! That's usually what it does! And, she leaves the leftover poison out, where her three little brothers can find it, eat it, and, again, as far as Merida knows, be killed by it. And she is the hero of the picture! The film treats her actions as totally appropriate!
 
Look, I know that what to do about a bully politician who runs on a platform of hurting everyone who doesn't vote for him is a complex question, and that as an adult, I shouldn't be looking to a picture book for answers. But a kid might! And while I don't expect any children's book to avoid simplification, I'd hope for one whose answers aren't quite so insipid. 'Just kill him, and then he won't be around anymore' isn't a good answer for a number of reasons, among them, it's not really practical or actionable.
 
Two of my favorite superheroes are Word Girl and Squirrel Girl, because they both address the question, what do you do about a bad guy, besides just be stronger than him and beat him up?
 
Squirrel Girl is probably better known. She had an ongoing Marvel comic series for awhile. About half the time, she uses her strength to simply stop the villain from whatever they're doing so she can talk with them, find out why they're rampaging, and see if they could be redirected to some more constructive activity instead. The rest of the time, talking doesn't work, but neither does simply being super strong and having the powers of a squirrel. To win, she needs a coalition, both other superhero allies, and reformed supervillains she previously talked to and made friends with.
 
Word Girl is probably less well known. She has a PBS kids' show that I used to watch all the time in grad school when I couldn't fall asleep. She's super strong, flies, and officially, her shtick is that she teaches you several vocabulary words every episode. And sometimes her villains are just wacky guys like The Butcher, who buries you under a pile of lunchmeat so you're immobilized while he robs you. But sometimes, she faces off against an evil businessman who uses mass hypnosis in his advertising to get people to buy his worthless products and/or revere him. Sometimes she faces an elderly woman who uses a 'sweet old grandmother' routine to trick people into helping her with her crimes. And in those cases, Word Girl can't win just by flying fast or punching hard. She has to convince the public that a crime has been committed at all, show them how they've been fooled, persuade them to turn against the villain. So she's not just teaching vocabulary, she's teaching critical thinking.

 

These stories are still simplified, but they're not simplistic. They model, at an interpersonal level, what you need to do when you can't win just by being physically strong. And one benefit to this, is that this kind of organizing is fractal - the same actions need to be repeated at several scales. Because a mass movement isn't just a gathering of millions of unaffiliated individuals. It's not even an organization made up of organizations - it's a coalition of coalitions. 

 

Organizing a mass protest is a lot like putting together a holiday parade. Yes, you invite everyone you can to show up and join the audience (and the audience absolutely is a part of the event) but the core of the event is made up of pre-existing groups, which normally meet separately and each do their own thing, cooperating on a shared goal. The bridge work connecting group to group and collection-of-groups to collection-of-groups is important, but so is the work of building and maintaining each of the individual teams and clubs. And practicing at the interpersonal level is how you learn to make connections between groups. Cooperating with friends is both an excellent first step, and a guide to what you should do next.

 
Is it fair to hold Imelda and the Goblin King to this standard? No, absolutely not. I ought to engage with it on its own terms, rather than imposing judgment based on American politics a decade after it was written and my own idiosyncratic test for the 'right' way to teach kids how to handle conflict. But that's where I'm at. Right now, I don't know how to be fair.

The Travelling Cat Chronicles

 
 

The Travelling Cat Chronicles

by Hiro Arikawa

translated by Philip Gabriel

Berkley

2012, reprinted 2018 

 

 

Hiro Arikawa's The Travelling Cat Chronicles is a short, sentimental novel narrated by the cat, Nana, as his human Satoru revisits old friends in an attempt to settle Nana into a new home.

I know that almost all authors are trying to provoke emotional responses from their readers, but in Arikawa's case, I was consciously aware that she was trying to manipulate my feelings, and I resented it. By chance, I watched the documentary Objectified in between chapters while I was reading this. One of the product designers, in defending his own commitment to minimalism, said 'When the poet's sentiments are overly visible, the audience may become uncomfortable', which struck me as an accurate summary of how I felt most of the time while reading this. But knowing someone is trying to provoke you does not, by itself, defend you against it, and Arikawa got me to cry through the last two chapters.

So, I don't like that, but I know that many people do. A friend pressed this book into my hands, and when I complained that I felt manipulated, several others spoke up to say sometimes they want that. This was a best-seller in Japan before getting translated; I recognize that I'm the outlier here. And I sometimes enjoy YA that accurately captures the intense, amplified emotions of adolescence. But a big part of my complaint isn't that this is emotional, but that, to me, the emotions often felt forced, overstated, inauthentic.

The book is mostly narrated in the first person by a cat, but the way Arikawa imagines Nana talking isn't how I imagine a cat talking. That's not to say I'm right and she's wrong, but it means that I experienced most of the narration as feeling false.

Nana is a stray black-and-white kitten who likes to sleep on the hood of Satoru's silver van. Satoru names Nana for the Japanese word for 'seven', which is what Nana's tail looks like. Nana gets injured, so Satoru adopts him, and they live together for several years before Satoru suddenly starts trying to give Nana away to one of his old friends, for unstated reasons. Each attempt involves a van-ride and a trip down memory lane, which like, resolves some unfinished business between the two of them, before they decide Nana won't work out here, and the pair return home.

I did worry that was all a shaggy dog story, that we'd find out there was no reason, that Satoru never intended to give up Nana, and all that was a pretext for him to go reminisce and fix his friendships before keeping Nana in the end. But Satoru really is putting his affairs in order for a reason, and that reason is why the last couple chapters are so sad. The one thing I thought Arikawa captured the way it really feels is watching someone you care about be very sick and not being able to do anything to help them.

Satoru goes to visit his childhood best friend, then his buddy from middle school, the the couple he was pals with in high school and college, and finally moves back in with his aunt who raised him after his parents died. She kept having to move for work, which is why each chapter of Satoru's life was in a different location. We see that not only is the one spot of tension between Satoru and each of his friends healed, but his visit helps each of them fix something that's wrong in their life right now. Nana intentionally sabotages each visit so he can keep going home with Satoru, until they get to the aunt's house, which becomes his permanent new home.

I have a hunch that if you like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants or The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing or The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, then you will probably like this. I really haven't meant to read so many sad books recently, and I'll probably seek out something different for my next few reads.

The Wolf's Secret

 
 

The Wolf's Secret

by Myriam Dahman and Nicolas Digard

art by Julia Sarda

Orchard Books

2020

 

 

The Wolf's Secret is another children's picture book I picked up for the chance to see Julia Sarda's art. Once again, authors Myriam Dahman and Nicolas Digard remix elements of folk lore and fable to tell a new story that feels like it could be from long ago.

In the woods lives the biggest wolf. Every day he hunts, and every other creature in the forest fears him. The wolf likes to go to the edge of a clearing and listen to a human woman sing. She lives in a cabin in the clearing, and sings for her father, who is sick.

One day the singing stops. The wolf keeps returning to the clearing, but the woman doesn't start up again. He doesn't know what to do. Then, the wolf catches a rabbit, who promises to do him a favor if he'll let it go. He does, and the rabbit turns into a wizard. He sets the wolf on a path that will lead him back to the woman.

The wolf follows the path, and ends up with a magic bell he can wear around his neck. It allows him to speak the human language. He goes back to the cabin in the clearing and speaks to the woman while standing behind her. She says she can't sing because she's sad since her father died. The wolf offers to be her companion and keep her company, if she'll sing for him, and if she'll promise to never turn around to see him...

You might guess what happened, but Dahman and Digard find a way to give us a happy ending. The rabbit who becomes a wizard reminds me of one of Aesop's fables. The larger structure of the book resembles Japanese and European legends about shapeshifting animal and fairy spouses, what we might call 'selkie stories,' (following Sophia Samatar,) even when they're not about seal-women specifically. But in those stories, the price of curiosity is abandonment. This tale is much gentler.

This is an earlier example of Sarda's art than I've seen before. Her style is perfectly consistent, but I think in some of the later books, her compositions are livelier, and she finds more opportunities for embellishment. Here the pictures themselves are a bit simpler, even if each figure or background is no less detailed. The wizard with his beard of autumn leaves is a standout, and the other forest creatures reacting with surprise when the wolf puts on the bell is excellent.

Leina and the Lord of the Toadstools

 

Leina and the Lord of the Toadstools 

by Myriam Dahman and Nicolas Digard
art by Julia Sarda
Orchard Books
2022

 

I really love Julia Sarda's art, and I'm hoping to read a couple more books she's illustrated this year. First up is Leina and the Lord of the Toadstools, an children's book that blends aspects of European fairy tale and American tall tale to tell a new story that has an uncanny feeling of being familiar and old.
 
Leina is the ferry woman for a small town on the bank of a river 'out west.' Every morning, Leina boats people across the river to the forest to chop wood and forage, and every evening she boats them home. Leina has a crush on Oren, who is kind to her, but she's too shy to talk when she's around him.
 
One evening, Oren isn't there to catch the ferry home, and doesn't return the next day either. This isn't the first time someone's disappeared this way. There's a storm, and Leina goes across to look for him, but instead meets a man-sized toad wearing a suit. He introduces himself as Mr Spadefoot, the Lord of the Toadstools. Leina takes him to town to do business, but the townspeople drive him off. Leina boats him back to the forest, and he invites her to his house for dinner.
 
At Mr Spadefoot's house, Leina discovers that he's been turning townspeople into animals and keeping them in cages. She realizes he means to do the same to her. If she wants to save Oren, and herself, she'll have to find a way to get the better of him...
 
Mr Spadefoot is a pretty good villain! In a few short pages, he reminds me of Bluebeard, Rumpelstiltskin, even the Devil making trades over fiddle contests at the crossroads. There are also themes of hospitality, and a sense that while the townspeople don't deserve exactly what's happening to them, they do need to do better, both to the forest and to any visitors they receive. We don't learn a lot about Leina, but she gathers her courage when she needs to, and remains curious and clever, even in the face of a monster who scares her.
 
Sarda's art is delightful. The forest scenes are full of detail, Mr Spadefoot's house appropriately strange and maze-like. Some of the smaller pictures are framed in boxes where Sarda has used repeating patterns on the edges, which gives those images an older, storybook feel.

Little Witch Hazel

 
 
Little Witch Hazel
A Year in the Forest
by Phoebe Wahl
Tundra Books

2021

 

 

In the background, I'm reading a literary novel, but I wanted a little break, and Little Witch Hazel was a brief, gentle change of pace.

 
Hazel's size and peaked red hat make her look a bit like a classical gnome. She lives in the forest in a tree-stump cottage, has a garden of herbs and mushrooms, and goes out foraging with a basket on her back. The forest is occupied by talking moles and mice and the like, as well as elves and pixies and such.

 
This is a children's picture book with four short stories that cover the four seasons. The stories are free from conflict and have only the smallest amounts of negative emotion to create narrative tension. The art is simple but nice, with a restrained palette of dark green, blue, black, red, brown, and tan, plus white. The style looks like hand-drawing with pastels. I liked this book okay, but I'm sure there are people who love it.

 
In the spring, Hazel finds an owl egg and raises the baby owl until it can fly away. 

 
In the summer, Hazel wants to run errands, but everyone else is relaxing, so she lets herself be persuaded to relax too. 

 
In the fall, everyone hears a scary moaning noise, and everyone has their own theory about what's causing it. Hazels goes to investigate, and meets a new neighbor, who's just lonely, so Hazel makes them feel welcome.

 
In the winter, Hazel goes out visitig her sick neighbors, then gets caught in a snow storm on the way home. But someone she helped in a previous story returns the favor by helping her get home safely.

 
There's not really a consistent theme to the stories- in the summer, Hazel needed to listen to her friends instead of staying grumpy, in the fall, it was good that she was braver than the others, but in the winter, she should've been more afraid of the weather. But Hazel does model a cozy, cottagecore dream life, and she is generally rewarded for engaging with her neighbors and helping other members of the community.

Frog and Toad are Friends

 
 
Frog and Toad are Friends

by Arthur Lobel
Harper Collins
1970, reprinted 2003
 

 

I read Frog and Toad are Friends as a follow-up to The Wind in the Willows, but aside from having animal protagonists, they're quite different books.

 
Toad is a bit of an introvert. He wants to stay inside, preferably in bed. He's embarrassed for others to see his swimsuit, he gets upset when he loses a button and can't find it.

 
Frog gently encourages his friend to get up and go outside. He gives Toad space to feel negative emotions without being judged for it, but also tries to cheer him up.

 
These stories are sweet and gentle, and very short. Frog and Toad go for a walk, go for a swim, look for a lost button, tell each other stories, wait for the mail.

 
I read recently that Arthur Lobel and several other beloved children's authors were gay, and that this probably informed their writing. These authors told stories about characters who felt different from their peers and struggled with difficult emotions, and told their readers that that was okay. Instead of plots about heterosexual romance, they told stories that celebrated platonic friendship. And in doing so, they told stories that might help future queer kids, but that also spoke to more universal feelings that aren't always represented in other books.

The Wind in the Willows

 
 
The Wind in the Willows

by Kenneth Grahame
art by Don Daily
Applesauce Press

1908, reprinted 2014
 

I'm sure I read The Wind in the Willows at some point as a kid, although I could hardly remember it, and I think it might have been mixed up with the Frog and Toad stories. Maybe I'll reread those soon too!
 

We start off following Mole as he skips out on spring cleaning to go enjoy a lovely spring day, then meets up with Rat, who's out boating. Mole joins Rat for boating and a picnic, and then seems to just move into Rat's house. They remain the characters we follow most closely, but what they're really interested in is their friend Toad.

 
Toad sees a couple human men driving a car, and decides he wants to take up this fascinating new hobby. He's a terrible driver, but very rich, so he keeps buying and crashing cars. Badger, Mole, and Rat basically put Toad on house arrest to stop him from wasting so much money on cars, but he escapes, steals someone else's car and wrecks it, and gets thrown in jail. Toad later escapes jail by disguising himself as a laundry woman, and somehow manages to hitchhike, take over driving, and crash again on his way back to his friends.

 
While Toad was in prison, some weasels moved into Toad Hall and took it over, so the four friends load up on pistols and sabers and burst into Toad's house, scaring all the weasels away, and they celebrate with a black tie ball, as one does, I suppose. 

 
Honestly, aside from the fact that they're all animals, these stories are all really reminiscent of the antics of Jeeves and Wooster. I like J&W though, so I certainly see the appeal of the genre!