Dear Readers,
There’s something I want you to add
to your Christmas lists: some new light from Sylvia Ross.
Sylvia is a local treasure whose
books I have reviewed before in this column.
She was featured by the Book Garden in Exeter Dec. 3rd, where
she signed copies of her two newest children’s books, Fables In An Old Style (Bentley Avenue Books, 2015.)
I wouldn’t know Sylvia if I hadn’t
been blessed with a job at the Book Garden eight years ago. We kept and ordered copies of her first two
children’s books published by Berkeley’s Heyday Press, The Lion Singer and Blue
Jay Girl, and she would come to the store when she needed one. The realities of the publishing world at that
time meant that we could order copies of her books cheaper than she, the
author, could.
In the interim, the small miracle of
self-publishing occurred, unlocking the doors of print media and unleashing
writers from the stranglehold of the publishing world. In the case of Sylvia Ross, the result has
been the betterment of our culture and our communities.
Fables
In An Old Style / Fabulas En Un Estilo Antiguo, Books One and Two, are
billed as “Comparative Literature for Children.” Ostensibly they are children’s stories, but I
found them more an immersion in real life through stories about children,
through children’s eyes, for adults.
It’s just who she is, this Sylvia Ross who lives up the road, around the
bend in Lemon Cove with her wonderful husband Bob and children and grandchildren. She doesn’t discriminate according to age
cohort or gender, much less race or ethnicity.
She paints them – us – altogether, just like in real life, and reminds
us of that reality in the process.
There are two terribly delicious
distinctions between Sylvia’s Fables
and most children’s books you’ll find on bookstore shelves. The first is that they are bilingual, written
in English and Spanish (translated by Rosalinda Villareal Teller.) As you open the books, you find that the
story progresses page by page with English on the left and Spanish on the
right. For families hoping to maintain
some semblance of both languages, these books offer evidence of the importance
of that effort as well as a tool for assisting in it. For those of us hoping to expand into one or
the other of our two major language systems in this valley, it’s a breath of
fresh air. Hope.
The other distinction is that they
are meant to be colored in. Once an
illustrator for Disney, Sylvia has drawn lovely pictures reminiscent of
coloring books interleaved in the stories, and suggests in the table of
contents that we buy a set of colored pencils to accompany the gift of these
books. “Some books seek a little
desecration,” she noted in Book Two.
But it’s the stories themselves that
are the gifts in these books. We meet
children both naughty and good-hearted, fathers with tempers and women who
forget the importance of common things, good kings and bad neighbors, and even
one dragon. We learn the relation
between good and bad, about growth of character, the development of morals, the
loss of goodwill and blessing, and the critical role of love in the world. Billed as “fables,” the stories are parables
about real life, and reading them, whether aloud to a little one or silently,
letting the storyline work its magic inside our heads and hearts, we are
reminded what life is all about.
I encourage you to meet the village gardeners,
wizards, witches and woodworkers who Sylvia has gathered together for us to
learn from, and take them home for Christmas.
You’ll see the holidays through sweeter eyes and watch otherwise
invisible miracles occur if you do.
Blessings as you go through these
next short days. Yours, Trudy
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Trudy
Wischemann is an avid reader who would be dead without books. You can send her your favorite fables c/o
P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
My daughter and I are reading "Fables in an old style, Book one" and Sylvia's work is beautiful, but we are native Spanish speakers and sorry to say that the Spanish translation is just terrible, like if it was done with google translator without even checking it at all.
ReplyDeleteI can offer a much better translation into Spanish, please contact me for further details.