Bear It Somehow: Our Year in Family Reading

As I sit in my kitchen writing this, it is near dusk on Tuesday, November 12. It has been one week since the presidential election. My original deadline for this piece—a personal essay-cum-review of my kids’ and my favorite books from the past year—was the end of October. I listed my books, collected quotes and jotted down lots of notes. Then I wrote to my editor saying it seemed unwise to write about 2024 without knowing how the election would turn out. He agreed to give me more time.

Now, here I am—here we all are—sitting with the results; with what is, what has always been. With this country’s dark underbelly fully exposed. Rage is a place I can write from. The hollowed-out feeling of grief? Not so much.

I tried and failed to begin this piece again and again. I couldn’t find my way in. Then, I read a poem by Louise Erdrich, “Advice To Myself #2, Resistance,” and in it, the lines Resist turning your back on the knife / of the world’s sorrow. The poem showed me an opening. Poems so often do.

I clicked on the document in which I’d put my notes for this piece, and skimmed quickly through. I had, it seemed, left myself something of a trail of breadcrumbs, bits of ballast-containing wisdom to help me start to pick my way forward through the lostness and pain.

It began with this question posed by writer Kate DiCamillo on what she considers her calling, the “sacred task of telling stories to the young”: “How do we tell the truth and make that truth bearable?”

It is a question DiCamillo has answered across her oeuvre, an incredible accomplishment I experienced when, after listening to the interview from which that question comes, I read her—aloud, and to my children—for the first time. The book was Because of Winn Dixie; my twins were five at the time.

I’d been completely unprepared for how deeply I’d be moved by DiCamillo’s plain yet graceful narration of loss, loneliness, and pain, and the places and beings in whom we seek solace. Nor was I prepared for the impact it had on my children; nothing I’d read to them before then had so affirmed my kids’ innate ability to see and feel the whole world—albeit in microcosm—and, inside of it, the full range of experiences and emotions.

It’s a feat for which DiCamillo has become beloved, and that she pulls off again in her latest novel, Ferris (Candlewick). The characters are workaday: a pesky little sister, two parents, animals, neighbors, an aunt and uncle who have separated (it’s unclear, for much of the book, whether permanently or not), an aging (and, we learn, ailing) grandmother, and ghosts. The characters bumble about, annoying and hurting one another, making all kinds of very human mistakes (“She drives me crazy!” Ferris says about her little sister, Pinky. “She is unfathomable.” Ferris’s friend listens quietly, then responds, “Yeah, Pinky is kind of hard to understand. But you could maybe ask her what she is thinking.” Can you imagine a better reminder for children—indeed, for all of us—to exercise curiosity over judgement?). Though Ferris’s world is punctured by irreconcilable loss and heartbreak, it is held together by quotidian acts of nurturance and care.

The book is blessedly free of grand gestures or tidy conclusions. Rather, DiCamillo models in her characters what is needed from us in our day-to-day: an acceptance of change, and a willingness to repair when we’ve caused harm of any kind. This requires practice, patience, and humility, and a curiosity about what can happen when we stay in relationships amid discomfort, a message both modeled and articulated throughout Ferris. As in all of her best work, this is DiCamillo ministering to her readers—children and adults, alike—reminding us “what we’re here for after all,” the difficult and essential project of “loving mightily and widely.”

We read Ferris in the spring of ’24, as the cry for a ceasefire in Palestine and divestment of American institutions from Israel grew louder and more organized. I talked often with my children about the war, most pointedly about the crucial distinction between remembering the cruelties wrought upon Jews (my and my children’s ancestry included) over time, and using those harms as justification for retaliatory occupation, oppression, and violence. My kids seemed to understand; in my experience, most children’s sense of justice is crystal clear.

But my twins were seven when the war broke out, and, despite my drawing their awareness to its awful events, the war remained an abstraction to my kids. I needed something relatable in its granularity and concreteness through which to explore conflict and its resolution, direct action, mutual aid, and community.

Which is how we came to start The Vanderbeekers books by Karina Yan Glaser. The series isn’t brand new—the first book, The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street (Clarion), came out in the fall of 2017—but the quick succession in which Yan Glaser wrote the novels (the 7th and final installment came out in 2023) gives the series as a whole a continuous, present-tense feel. Neither Trump nor the pandemic are ever named. There is no allusion to George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police, the Dobbs decision, rampant wildfires, or the hottest years on record. To some, these may feel like critical omissions; I admit, as we moved through the series, the absence of such events and cultural forces in these otherwise obviously contemporary books gave me pause.

And yet, as my children and I drew deeper and deeper into the Vanderbeekers’ world, I found myself appreciating Yan Glaser’s approach. Her implicit point, much like DiCamillo’s, is that while it may be important to keep an eye on capital-P politics and global events, the crucible of practice for our ability to face those challenges, is in the interactions with the people and places who are physically part of our day-to-day. This includes the obvious—our nuclear and extended families. But Yan Glaser powerfully engulfs a much wider catchment of care, those we are bound to not by blood, but by proximity and happenstance, to her notion of kinship.

The Vanderbeekers interact intimately with neighbors, postal workers, sanitation workers, librarians, and small business owners; veterinarians, teachers, nurses, mechanics, ministers, gardeners. Within these relationships, everything happens: anger, displacement, illness and death. Learning, waiting, failure, and disappointment. Bold overtures, crippling social anxiety, and the gift of unexpected love (Here, a quibble: While the Vanderbeeker community is diverse in its representations of race, it is frustratingly homogenous in its presentation of everything from crushes to committed partnership and domestic life; there is nary a queer person nor relationship in sight).

The book’s characters are forever hurting one another’s feelings and doing damage when they intend to do good. Their lives can feel hemmed-in—they are apartment dwellers, in each other’s hair and always underfoot (meanwhile, the Vanderbeeker parents exhibit a kind of equanimity borne of patience and a sturdy “natural consequences” mentality that I can only aspire to). As such, the world of mama and papa Vanderbeeker and their five children feels expansive, even though, for most of the series, the family’s geographic range is quite small: Only one of the five Vanderbeeker children has ever flown on an airplane, and the family doesn’t vacation frequently, or particularly far afield. Children share bedrooms. The family does not own a car. In one book, papa is often on the phone, going head-to-head with the family’s health insurance provider, advocating for their coverage of vital medical care.

And while the Vanderbeeker children occasionally express envy or frustration about the ways in which their family’s material circumstances—which we are shown are more than comfortable, but far from limitless—constrain them, more often than not, they meet their reality with creativity, acceptance, and even appreciation. They are entangled in a web of intimacy, one that encourages them to stay far more than it fuels their desire to go.

Part of the books’ wisdom is in recognizing that this isn’t necessarily lesser-than, nearly everything the Vanderbeekers might yearn to experience in the wider world exists, too, in their particular corner of the universe.

The wholeness of the Vanderbeekers raises an urgent question of our times: When do we up and go, and when should we stay put? Given the concurrent crises of loneliness and a climate in dire straits, why do those who have the privilege of choice continue to participate in work and leisure that continually wrenches us away from our communities, while doing so much environmental harm? Where does our cultural compulsion to stay in perpetual motion come from, anyway? And what are we so avidly trying to escape?

These are just some of the questions at the heart of another series—this one focused upon non-human communities—that gripped my family this year, Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot (Little, Brown). My kids and I began reading The Wild Robot a few years ago after the second book in the series, The Wild Robot Escapes, was published in 2018 (the first Wild Robot book came out in 2016). I fell for the books hard, overcome by the tenderness, fragility, and resilience of Brown’s storytelling about an island teeming with diverse wildlife; Roz, a robot who has fallen off a cargo ship and washed ashore; and a young goose named Brightbill who Roz takes under her robotic wing.

All Brown’s creatures are forced to figure out how to coexist and survive under the threats presented by climate change, and by the sophisticated but unwieldy technologies that humans have unleashed into the world. My family didn’t make it through book two; my kids were frightened, and unable to fully connect with the world of the Wild Robot at the time. But I decided to return to the series when, this past summer, I saw that a movie adaptation was on the horizon.

I was pleased to find that Brown’s core themes—he points at the simultaneous fragility and resilience of our planet; the creativity and tenacity of mothers; the harm of scarcity mindsets; and the depth of what we’re capable of when called upon to protect one another; and the redeeming power of love—remain strong throughout the entirety of the series. This go round, my kids were ready for the stories to land. And I felt their profundity and resonance all over again. The whole series held all three of us rapt.

I was skeptical of the movie’s ability to go to all the places the books do, and as effectively. But curiosity won out; I took my kids to see The Wild Robot anyway. (Reader, forgive me for endorsing a film in the midst of an essay about books, but I feel strongly about this one). I was struck by the ways in which the filmmakers extended and radicalized Brown’s world. Many of the relationships in the film read as queerer than they do in the book, and the characters seemed both fiercer and freer. All three Wild Robot books struck a chord, but, for me, the screen adaptation reached an even deeper place. I wept reading Brown’s books; watching the movie, I sobbed.

There is so much loss, destruction, and uncertainty in The Wild Robot, all the suffering of the world. But kindness, Brown reminds us, is a survival skill, the capacity for which is something we cannot be robbed of. The world of The Wild Robot, as those of Ferris and The Vanderbeekers, is rendered with such familiarity, honesty, and tenderness that it calls to mind one of Kate DiCamillo’s truths about what the best storytelling can do for us, and what we need from it now more than ever: “I found out that I could bear it,” Camillo says. “That was what the story told me. That was what I needed to hear. That I could bear it somehow.”

And bear it we must. Because we don’t get to give up.

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As my kids become more advanced and independent readers, we don’t read nearly as many picture books these days. But a few of this year’s new arrivals for younger readers deserve mention, for their timeless, and timely, themes.

One is Chris Baker’s On A Mushroom Day (Tundra), which, through clear, sparkling prose and Alexandra Finkeldey’s gorgeous mycologically-accurate and proudly queer illustrations, encourages deepening our relationship with the wonder, splendor, and baffling complexity of kingdom fungi (for an adult companion read, I highly recommend Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World). I appreciate the ways in which the vastness and complexity of the natural world help me feel cosmically small in times of overwhelm.

Another picture book, equally awe-inducing and humbling in its scope, is Something About the Sky, written by Silent Spring author and environmental activist, Rachel Carson. Carson penned the book’s prose in 1956—it was originally intended as the script for a children’s television show—but it didn’t see the light of day until 2021. This year, Candlewick published a version beautifully illustrated by Nikki McClure (who is among my favorite living artists, and whose work I’ve celebrated previously).

“Clouds are as old as the earth itself,” wrote Carson, “symbols of a process without which life itself could not exist on earth.” “Sometimes the process is marked by the violence of storms. Sometimes Nature indulges in the wild fury of floods.” Carson calls this “a drama of turbulence and change,” a line that strikes me as among the most symbolic of the rage and upheaval of this moment as any I’ve encountered.

Our other two 2024 household favorites take on the evergreen, but especially politically timely topics of immigration, racism, xenophobia, and belonging. In Not Far From Here (ill. Devon Holzwarth; Candlewick), author Nydia Armedia-Sánchez earnestly details the myriad challenges of migrating across contested international borders, and the strength and tenacity required to navigate discrimination, cultural differences, and structural hurdles to making home anew.

We Are Definitely Human, by X. Fang (who happens to be Peter Brown of The Wild Robot’s partner, and wrote and illustrated Dim Sum Palace, a household favorite from last year; both books are published by Tundra), takes a more humorous, less on-the-nose approach in the form of prose and images that depict a group of aliens’ arrival on earth, and their interactions with humans who are, at turns, skeptical, suspicious, and amused. Fang’s touch may be lighter than Armedia-Sánchez’s, but both point to the necessity to make space for those seeking refuge and belonging in a frightening, rapidly-shifting world.