| From
the January/February 2007 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
True Stories All
 hen
our Fanfare
list (see pages 10–16) and the other book prizes are announced
at this time of year, I often reflect that the job of literature
is to keep critics on their toes. (The pleasures of literature are
myriad but off-topic.) Great books change the rules and, hopefully,
change our rules, lest we wind up judging the books of
today by yesterday’s standards.
I used to think, for example, that the distinction
between fiction and nonfiction was fairly bright-lined, and rightly
so. In the past year James Frey showed us that ain’t necessarily
so. But so did Lane Smith, in John, Paul, George & Ben,
and here we can see how such blurring can work for the power of
good. What does this book think it’s doing, telling us that
Paul Revere sold plus-size ladies’ underwear, and other lies
about the Founding Fathers? But it also tells us that Paul Revere
did not call out “The British are coming!”
— a fact I didn’t know (and wish I had, as he went right
by the Horn Book offices). John, Paul, George & Ben
mixes facts and lies and folklore and jokes together to make readers
understand not only the truth, but also the limits of truth as far
as we know it, and the questions a nation must continue to ask of
its history.
And what of Jeanette Winter’s Mama,
or Carole Boston Weatherford and Kadir Nelson’s Moses?
Both books adhere to the facts as we know them (Mama, about
the hippo that bonded with a tortoise after the 2004 tsunami, and
Moses, about Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery).
But both also presume to enter the hearts of their heroes, with
the hippo’s expressed need for his “mama” and
Tubman’s prayers to God. Considering that Tubman was alone
in the woods when she prayed, and the hippo was adrift in the ocean
(and was, in fact, a hippo), and we can’t know just
what they thought or said, we should perhaps call the books fiction
— but the premise and authority of each story comes from its
actually having happened. This is a different order of legitimacy
than that of, say, M. T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing,
firmly grounded in history but just as firmly fiction.
All narrative — biography, history, memoir,
novel — is “based on a true story.” This is not
to say that Russell Freedman’s Freedom Walkers is
anything less than scrupulously attentive to the historic record,
or that Silvana De Mari’s The Last Dragon is not
wholly imagined speculative fiction. But Freedom Walkers
excels because of Freedman’s chosen focus and selection of
details, the way he tells his story as much as the “true story”
he has to tell. And the people — not to mention the dragon
and the elf — in The Last Dragon elicit empathy in
us because they are us, their selves, souls, and situations our
own, the “true story” of what it means to be human.
So while we have divided our annual Fanfare list
into picture books, fiction, and nonfiction (the fact that there
is no folklore or poetry honored this year is a subject for another
editorial!), know that in some cases the classification is a best
guess, as writers and artists find new genre-bending ways of telling
us the truth.
From the January/February 2007 issue of
The Horn Book Magazine |
