Celebrating gratitude with good books

It is fitting that November is the month when we celebrate gratitude. Who has not looked up into a tapestry of fall color and whispered a thanks?

These new books make me grateful too, grateful for good stories and people to tell and draw them.

'Strange Fruit” (Fulcrum, 2014; 23.95) is a graphic novel written and illustrated by Joel Christian Gill, not for the youngest in the family but for any middle elementary age child. Gill has collected stories 'from early African American history that represent the oddity of success in the face of great adversity.” These are stories of real people. Henry 'Box” Brown escaped slavery by having himself packed into a box and shipped north to abolitionists in Philadelphia. Theophilus Thompson started his life as a slave and became the first recognized African-American chess master. He disappeared in the middle of his successful career. No one has solved the mystery. Spottswood Rice whose story is movingly expressed in letters: 'My Children, I take my pen in hand to rite you a few lines to let you know ... I have not forgot you. I want you to be contented with whatever may be your lots but be assured I will have you if it cost me my life.” Gill shows us Rice taking his daughter from the woman who considered the child property. Some stories are short and end in mystery. Others are longer and show us a rounded life. This is a book that makes us want to know more and makes us grateful to Gill, who brought these real people out of the fog and onto the stage of our awareness.

'Food Trucks” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014; $16.00) by Mark Todd takes us from the heroic to the hearty. Each two page spread in this book features a different kind of food truck - breakfast truck, hamburger truck - 'the Better Burger Builder Bus,” - the barbecue truck, the falafel truck, etc. And each truck describes itself in rhyme. In addition to the rhymes, each spread also features interesting facts about the food available from the truck. From the curry truck page we learn that a tandoori oven - 'a large clay pot with a hole in the top, is used to make naan bread and dishes such as tandoori chicken ...” This is a lively book and contains many fun facts. The rhymes could be more sparkling, but the overall effect of the book still might stir interest in various foods and the traveling kitchens that are now coming to Cedar Rapids.

'The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night” (Doubleday, 1961/2014; $17.99) is based on the folk song of the same title and illustrated by Peter Spier. It was named a Caldecott Honor Book when it first came out. In that early edition only one side of each page was printed in color. In 2013 an editor at Doubleday asked Spier if he 'could add color to the black-and-white pages of the book.” In a lovely author's note at the end of the book Spier describes his reaction to this request, ' ... at age eighty-six and more than half a century later, I wondered if I would be able to do it as well as when I was thirty-one.” He was. This is a book to pore over. The illustrations are detailed, expressive and now rich with the colors of fall. The book will be great fun any day of the year but the song would be perfect for a Thanksgiving afternoon singalong.