Well, this sort of Thai setting, Buddhist, dystopian fantasy middle grade novel is not exactly the kind of book I would have expected to enjoy, but I did. The author blurb says that Ms. Soontornvat grew up in Texas and lives in Austin, so maybe some of the Texan in her got into this novel, too? The blurb also calls the story Soontornvat’s twist on Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, my favorite book ever, so maybe that’s why I liked it. Anyway, I thought it was quite fascinating with a positive message about light conquering darkness and change being difficult and costly but possible.

The book begins in a women’s prison in the city of Chattana. Pong and Somkit are orphan boys, born in the prison to convict mothers who died when the boys were infants. Children born in the prison are unjustly condemned to remain there until they reach the age of thirteen, but Pong escapes early and ends up in a monastery where he becomes the acolyte and disciple of a monk named Father Cham (Bishop Myriel).

Meanwhile, back in the city, the Governor who came to the city to bring light and order and goodness to Chattana has become a dictator who provides his orbs of colored light to those who serve him and keep the law perfectly while he imprisons all those who fail to please him or follow his ever-increasing number of rules. And those who fall in-between? They are sinking deeper and deeper into poverty and despair.

Pong becomes our boyish Jean Valjean as he flees the long arm of the law and sees himself as condemned to be always running, always sinning. He wants freedom and thinks that he will do anything to obtain it, but eventually he learns the lesson: “You can’t run away from darkness. It’s everywhere. The only way to see through it is to shine a light.”

As I said, I thought this was a great novel, but there are a couple of caveats that might give some readers pause. It is, as I said, Buddhist with Buddhist monks and visions and prayers and a statue of Buddha at the center of the monastery, but it’s Buddhism-lite with not much Buddhist theology thrown in that I could see. In addition, one of the adult characters talks about the extramarital affair he had in the past, no sordid details, but it’s a plot point. If those two aspects of the book aren’t a problem for you, then I highly recommend A Wish in the Dark.

The Sallie Perry Stewart in this newspaper article, published in 1938, is my great-great grandmother:

96 YEAR OLD, WHO CAME TO TEXAS IN 1849, HAS NEVER OWNED A COOK STOVE OR SEWING MACHINE, MADE A DRESS, DONE A LAUNDRY OR USED LIPSTICK   by Maud Green 

As the spring of 1938 goes down the steps of time, it adds its share to the blurred memory and sight of a tiny white haired woman who is now living in the winter of life, and drawing into the shadow of the century mark on life’s highway.  But the many years have not taken from her a vivid recollection of her childhood days and an intense desire to return to the state of her birth.  
This “little old lady” Mrs. Sally Catherine Stewart, celebrated her ninety-sixth birthday last Dec. 19.  She is probably the oldest living resident in West Texas.  Although she has lived almost a century, she has never owned a cook stove or a sewing machine.  She has never done a laundry or made a dress, and today she recalls how she used to powder her nose with corn-starch, and vows probably one of the reasons she has lived so long is because she “never used a lip stick.” 
Sally C. came to Texas when she was eight years old.  She was born in Montgomery, Ala. in 1841 and as she sits in her favorite chair, she talks constantly of Montgomery with a childish humor that keeps her listeners in an uproar.  She tell of a little boy she remembers who told a friend that he “lived in the rhuburbs of Montgomery” he meant suburbs but got his words mixed up.
Her father was related to Marshall and Ruf Perry, famous Indian fighters of early Texas days.  The Perry family came to Texas in 1849, in the days when crossing the Mississippi meant almost a week on ferry boats.  There were 13 children in the Perry family. A rather peculiar fact about these 13 children is that Sally Catherine was the middle one and she is the only one of them alive today.  The Perrys were accompanied by their grandmother who made her home in Texas with them.  This grandmother lacked a few months of being one hundred years old when she died.
Marshall Perry met the new comers on the Texas side of the river and conducted them to their home in Bastrop County.
In 1863 Sally Perry was married to John William Stewart.  Mr. Stewart was a Texas Ranger and served in various parts of the state for over 10 years.  The Stewarts made their home in Burnett, with him spending most of his time in the service on the Mexico border.  Mrs. Stewart is now drawing a pension as widow of the Texas Ranger.  Five children were born to Mr. and Mrs. John Stewart.  Of these five children the oldest and youngest are now all that are living.  They are B. C. Stewart, 73, Divide, with whom she now lives, and Bill Stewart, 63, of Roscoe.  Mr. Stewart died in 1873 just 10 years after his marriage to Sally Perry.  His death occurred on Aug. 19, which was the ninth birthday of his eldest son, B. C. 
During the time Mr. Stewart served as a Ranger he worked under Captain Chris Bitix,famous leader of the Texas Rangers.  His work included a close check on Indians and at one time a group of 300 of them were arrested near Austin and sent back across the border into Oklahoma.  Mrs. Stewart talks of the time the Indians, “such a big bunch of them” were camped near her home.
Sally Catherine has not been out of the state of Texas since she came here in 1849 and has lived in Nolan County since 1896. Her son, B. C. Stewart, and his family settled near Valley Creek which is about 15 miles from their present home at Divide.  Most of the traveling she did in early days was in an ox cart.
In all her 96 years she has seldom been sick enough to need a doctor.  When she was 74 years old, a doctor was called just to be sure it was smallpox she had.  She has owned one pair of glasses during her lifetime and they were soon thrown away and she proceeded to read without them.  She read constantly until the past few years, and she still reads headlines and is very fond of pictures.
Mrs. Stewart had been a member of the Church of Christ for over 68 years.  B. C. Stewart (you remember he is 73 years old) says one of his earliest remembrances is how frightened he was when his mother was led into the water to be baptised.  She continued her church work until a comparatively short time ago and she still talks about the Bible and wants each radio program to be some kind of religious service.
This lovable nonegenaran is still in exceptionally good health and talks with a sense of humor that is somtimes breath-taking. She has always eaten anything she fancied and has not yet formed the habit of pampering her appetite.   She has a will of her own as was shown when asked to have her pictures made.  “What do you want with my picture” she asked “We’re not going to raise a garden.”  After a bit of persuasion she decided it really would be fun to have her picture made.
She has 28 grandchildren, 51 great grandchildren, and seven great-great grandchildren. They are living in various parts of the west.   
And so the little white haired woman sits in peace and comfort and dreams of days that used to be.  When she heard talk of the Perrys and their Indian fights, she remarked that “Those Perrys were rip-tearers,” and that she was mighty proud that she was a Perry.  “If I were young folks, I’d go back to Montgomery,” she says dreamily.  “I can still remember the walks I used to take and the fun I used to have.”

My great-great grandmother (my maternal grandfather’s paternal grandmother) omits a key fact about her husband, John William “Buff” Stewart, the Texas Ranger. I’ll write about Buff next week. I wish I had the photograph that is mentioned in the article.

I’m going to try to make this post a weekly ritual, beginning with picture books from and about the state of Maine, way up north. With fifty states to travel to, by way of the best picture books I can find, this journey should take about a year.

Maine

• Motto: Dirigo/ I Lead
• Nickname: The Pine Tree State; The Vacation State
• State Flower:  White Pine Cone and Tassel
• State Bird: Chickadee

Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey. Viking, 1948. This first book is an old favorite. Wandering Sal meets a Mother Bear while the bee’s cub manages to follow Sal’s mother by mistake. “Little Bear and Little Sal’s mother and Little Sal and Little Bear’s mother were all mixed up with each other among the blueberries on Blueberry Hill.”

One Morning in Maine by Robert McCloskey. Viking, 1952. Sal again, but now she’s a big sister with a little sister named Jane, and Sal has a loose tooth, which makes her a big girl now. The day also holds a trip to the beach to dig clams and a trip to Buck’s Harbor and various other ups and downs as Sal shares with everyone she meets the story of her lost tooth.

Time of Wonder by Robert McCloskey. Viking, 1957. One summer on an island off the coast of Maine. “Out on the islands that poke their rocky shores above the waters of Penobscot Bay, you can watch the time of the world go by, from minute to minute, hour to hour, from day to day.”

The Finest Horse in Town by Jacqueline Briggs Martin. Illustrated by Susan Gaber. HarperCollins, 1992. This book is based on the stories that the author heard about her mother’s aunts who owned a dry goods store in a small town in Maine back in the early twentieth century. The story itself is fiction, what might have happened to the sisters and their wonderful horse.

Island Boy by Barbara Cooney. Viking Kestrel, 1988. Along with McCloskey, Barbara Cooney is probably the most well known Maine children’s author. Island Boy is about Matthias who lives Tibbets Island. Matthias is baby of twelve children, and although travels as a sailor and down the east coast, he finally comes back to Tibbets Island to live. Sad ending, but a wonderful family story.

Birdie’s Lighthouse by Deborah Hopkinson. Illustrated by Kimberly Bulcken Root. Aladdin, 1996. Bertha Holland tells the story in her journal of how she learned to help her papa keep the lights burning in the lighthouse on Turtle Island. Beautiful illustrations make the tale of Birdie’s bravery and diligence even more exciting.

The Stranded Whale by Jane Yolen. Illustrated by Melanie Cataldo. Candlewick, 2015. This lovely picture book, about some children who find a beached whale and try to save it, is really sad. Not for sensitive readers, but the story is realistic and as the author’s note in the back of the book says, “Beachings are always sad, . . . but the good news is that they don’t affect whale species as a whole.”

Surrounded by Sea: Life on a New England Fishing Island by Gail Gibbons. Holiday House, 1991. Does everyone in Maine live or at least summer on an island? This book presents life on a Maine island in a simple, factual manner. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but I like Gail Gibbons’ straightforward, just-the-facts style of writing.

The Circus Ship by Chris Van Dusen. Candlewick, 2009. Based on a true story, The Circus Ship is anything but just the facts, m’am. In rollicking, rhyming text, a ship carrying at least fifteen exotic circus animals is wrecked off the coast of Maine, and in Van Dusen’s story, the animals all swim to a nearby island (an island again!) and find a home among the village people there. It’s wildly imaginative, but still Maine-ish with white clapboard houses and New England-looking dress and signage.

I couldn’t find copies of these other three picture books about Maine that I found while researching online. If anyone knows about them and wants to recommend, please leave a comment. Or if you know of other picture books set in Maine that give a true flavor of the state, please share.

• Andre the Famous Harbor Seal by Fran Hodgkins.  Illustrated by Yetti Frenkel. Down East Books, 2003.
• Lobsterman by Dahlov Ipcar.  Down East Books, 1962. 
• The Story of the Sea Glass by Anne Dodd. Illustrated by Mary Beth Owens. Down East Books, 1999.

Next Saturday: VERMONT

Someone from one of the Facebook groups I follow was asking for recommendations for really high quality Christian fiction, especially science fiction, and this book by author Shawn Smucker was mentioned. In fact someone said that all of Mr. Smucker’s work was worth checking out. So I did.

This story is sort of a murder mystery/detective story with a horror/supernatural twist, and it was engaging. I liked the suspense and the slow unfolding of all the plot threads to come together in the end —almost seamlessly. But without giving away any of the story, I must say that there’s a Chekhov’s gun problem. Remember Chekhov’s gun?

“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

Something significant happens at the beginning of this book, and it turns out to be irrelevant. Not a red herring, but just not nearly as significant as it should be or as it’s made out to be at first. The main character does something, something dangerous and stupid and just plain wrong, but it never comes back to bite him. I guess that happens in real life just as unused guns hang on the wall in real life sometimes, but in fiction it is somewhat disconcerting. (Not everyone believes in the Chekhov’s gun rule. Ernest Hemingway “valued inconsequential details” in a story, according to Wikipedia.)

Other than that niggling little detail, Light From Distant Stars was a good read. I thought I might be interested in checking out something else by Shawn Smucker someday. However, as I look at descriptions of his titles they all sound like borderline horror, a genre I’m not too fond of. So maybe not. If you like weird, paranormal, ghostly kinds of stories with a Christian subtext (not overt, not preachy), then you might like Mr. Smucker’s books.

You’ve probably made many lists of what you planned to do on a given day or what you did accomplish at the end of the day, but have you ever made a list of what didn’t happen that day? The Camel Who Took a Walk is a story about what didn’t happen when the beautiful camel went for a walk at dawn in the forest.

I just love this story. It’s so simple and yet clever, and it makes me chuckle. (I’ve been needing to laugh.) The language is rich and yet also simple, even though the author was not a native English speaker. Some examples:

• “All the while, the beautiful camel walked gracefully down the road turning her pretty head this way and that, while the sky grew brighter and brighter.”
• “Her nose smelled the early morning sweetness, and her eyes took in all the blue and pink colors of the sky.”
• “Then the little bird burst into a peal of laughter that pierced the forest.”

Although Tworkov was an artist himself, someone had the good sense to ask illustrator Roger Duvoisin to illustrate the story. The mostly black and white pictures, with a hint of dawn color on some of the pages, complement the story perfectly and add to the suspense. Will the tiger pounce on the camel? Will the money drop the cocoanut? What will the squirrel and the bird do? Will someone warn the camel of her impending doom?

Jus the right amount of suspense for a preschool audience and a great ending. I read this book many times aloud to school children and to my own, and they were captivated every time.

The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key is another older science fiction title, published in 1965, and it reads like a vintage episode of The Twilight Zone. The boy, Jon, has lost his memory and does not know who he is or where he came from. He only knows that he has fallen through the forgotten door to this strange planet, Earth, and that he is in great danger.

Jon first meets up with some unfriendly, even hostile, people who chase him and are frightened by his exceptional abilities. Then, the Bean family—Thomas and Mary Bean and their children Brooks and Sally—befriend Jon and try to help him remember and return to his own home. But this story takes place back in the hills of the Carolinas, and not everyone is as welcoming as the Beans are to strangers, especially a strange boy who can run like a deer and who can possibly read minds.

As I said, this short 140 page juvenile novel reminded me of a TV episode from the 1960’s. I could picture the story played out on the small screen. The Beans come to realize that Jon is from an “advanced civilization” where things are simpler and more honest than they are on Earth. Jon doesn’t understand money or airplanes or killing animals for meat, but he does seem to understand some things quite well and learn things exceptionally quickly. The question is, how can Jon return to his own planet before his presence gets the Beans into serious trouble?

The science fiction of that time was more hopeful, much less dystopian than nowadays, and may even sound a little hokey to an adult reader of the 21st century. Nevertheless, I would be happy to recommend this book to children who are less jaded and more optimistic about the possibility of human perfectibility—or at least human improvement. Mr. Key also wrote Escape to Witch Mountain, a book with many of the same themes as this one. Escape to Witch Mountain was made into a Disney movie back in the seventies, and I remember reading it and seeing the movie back then, although I don’t remember much about it.

Read this one for a gentle introduction to science fiction and paranormal fiction (with no occult undertones). It’s a precursor to E.T.

For the smallest book lovers of all, the three and under crowd, I love books with real photographs. My baby grandchildren, 13 months old and 8 months, are still enjoying the Global Babies books with lots of pictures of babies from around the world. There are Global Babies, Global Baby Boys, Global Baby Girls, American Babies, and Global Baby Bedtimes—all published by The Global Fund for Children. Babies love pictures of other babies, and parents can enjoy talking about the babies and showing the pictures of babies in these board books to their own babies.

What comes next? I recommend Tana Hoban’s concept books with photographs of al sort of objects and scenes that will spark conversation and questioning with your youngest pre-readers. Learn about colors, numbers, shapes, sizes, things that go, machines, position, signs, and symbols—and much more—in these lovely books illustrated with Ms. Hoban’s award-winning photographs. Most of Hoban’s books are wordless, and the ones that do have a few words are understated and leave much room for the imagination and speaking skills of a child who is looking at the books to grow and develop. You can go through these books of photographs over and over again and see something new every time.

Tana Hoban was so prolific that I can’t list all of her many, many titles for young children, but here are a few of my favorites:

• Is It Red? Is It Yellow? Is It Blue?
• Count and See
• Dig, Drill, Dump, Fill
• Over, Under, & Through
• Push, Pull, Empty, Full; A Book of Opposites
• I Read Signs
•  I Read Symbols
• Is It Rough? Is It Smooth? Is It Shiny?
• Take Another Look
• Look Again!
• Cubes, Cones, Cylinders & Spheres
• 26 Letters and 99 Cents

Any of these, and others by Tana Hoban, will enrich your preschooler’s learning experiences and will make going for a walk even more exciting and discussion-filled than it was before you encountered these concept books. I love words, but having these books of just (mostly) photographs on hand for preschool learning is a great encouragement to building that vocabulary that leads to the enjoyment of entire stories. In fact, Hoban’s books encourage you and your preschooler to tell your own stories, and that’s definitely educational and just plain fun.

And by the way, I just read that Tana Hoban was Russell Hoban’s (the Frances books and others) older sister. Talent and a love for children and children’s books runs in the family, I guess.

Tana Hoban’s books are listed in my book, Picture Book Preschool. Picture Book Preschool is a preschool/kindergarten curriculum which consists of a list of picture books to read aloud for each week of the year and a character trait, a memory verse, and activities, all tied to the theme for the week. You can purchase an updated, downloadable version (pdf file) of Picture Book Preschool by Sherry Early at Biblioguides.