Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I appear to have missed Veterans Day, which is unfortunate; it does mean, however, that I have THREE completed books to choose from this morning. What to review? What to review?

I suppose I’ll go with the heaviest, which also happens to be a)due and not renewable this week and b)the one most recently finished, since I’ve been reading it aloud to my 7-year-old and we finished it within the last half hour or so. Telephone Tales came onto my radar in 2021, when it won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award. (The Batchelder Award is reserved for children’s books originally published outside of the US and in a language other than English, and it’s intended to encourage US publishers to translate and publish children’s books from around the world.) The premise of Telephone Tales intrigued me–a collection of stories for children short enough to be told in in the time a payphone gives for one coin–and so I put it on hold at my library. It proceeded to sit on my shelf for over a year until I realized that it could be a read-aloud with my youngest, and while the stories were often bizarre to an American audience, she was interested enough that we persisted. (VERY bizarre to an American audience. I wish I could ask native Europeans who’ve read it what they think, because it felt European enough that they might not have blinked an eye.) Most (if not all) stories came with large, not-finely-detailed illustrations, and they ran from poignant to amusing to thought-provoking to really, just plain odd. The format makes it handy for a read-aloud, so parents with children old enough to process stories outside of their cultural experience might want to look into it; I’m still trying to decide exactly how I felt about it!