top of page
Search

On Heroes and Jenn Reese's A Game of Fox & Squirrels

Most new parents recognize the precarity of their position: they know they will have the opportunity to be their child's hero, at least some of the time; just as assuredly, they know they will be a disappointment at times, perhaps even an embarrassment. They know they will mess up, but they hope they will never become the villain. But sometimes, they are. Sometimes, they are the very thing that child needs to be rescued from. Who then will be the hero?


In A Game of Fox & Squirrels, Jenn Reese applies a deft touch to this heavy reality. Through the clever and artful integration of a board game, populated by squirrels and an unpredictable fox, Reese portrays a painful truth and a powerful hope. Children need heroes, and they sometimes find them in unexpected places.

A Game of Fox & Squirrels opens on the week of Samantha's 11th birthday, the week she and her sister Caitlyn are moving in with their Aunt Vicky and her wife Hannah. Caitlyn is out of the hospital now, though her throwing arm will be in a cast for awhile. And though Sam is glad they are ok, she wants to be back home in Los Angeles, back with mom and dad and dad's unpredictable temper. Vicky is her dad's sister, but they've never really known her. And though their house is quiet and the chickens are fascinating and the forest is large and lovely, Sam doesn't want to like it there. It's complicated.


In fact, what Reese does so well is demonstrate how complicated abuse is. It's rarely as clarity-coated as TV and movies make it seem. Sam and Caitlyn's dad isn't uniformly awful; like the fox in the game, he can be charming and thoughtful. As Maple the squirrel says,

Nobody is only one thing.

And it's true. People are complicated. And Sam wants to get home, so when she opens the game and Ashander the fox invites her on a hero's quest, of course she agrees. She must solve Ashander's riddles and perform the tasks in order to earn the Golden Acorn, which will grant her greatest wish. As Ashander says, "Every good hero must prove their worth, isn't that right?"


Skillfully entwining the rules to the game, the real life of case workers and new friends and impossibly kind Aunts, and the mystery (or is it magic?) of the forest world, where Ashander and Maple and Birch and Cedar reside, Reese builds a lush and utterly convincing world. The emotional complexities tell the whole story, honestly, without going too deeply into physical details that might be concerning or triggering to readers.


Instead, Reese pours out her skill upon the physical details of the Oregon landscape. From the car, Sam notices

The tree-guards along the side of the road laughed, their branchy shoulders rustling. Oh, they were arrogant, those trees.

Or when Sam falls in the forest and, "The stones left little divots in her skin, like they didn't want to be so easily forgotten." Or when the forest changed, "eager to show her its true self" and

Shadows reached up from the ground, looping dark tendrils around roots and pulling flowers into darkness. The sun tried to fight its way through the treetops but was thwarted by the dense canopy of green.

These are powerful and beautiful descriptions. But the greatest beauty of this lovely book is in the way Vicky (with Hannah) demonstrates unconditional love and care for Sam and Caitlyn. They are uncertain, and like any new parent, they worry they don't know enough and that they will mess up. But they are consistent and true, and in a short time, they prove to Sam that their promises can be trusted, that their love is not contingent. And that kind of love is always heroic.

 

The 2021 Newbery Medal selection committee spends the whole year considering titles. As always, I will be reading and reviewing along with the committee, keeping one eye on today's young readers and the other eye on each book's prospects. After each review, I'll offer my one-sentence take (OST) on medal-worthiness.

OST: If it can find an advocate on the committee, this book has a real chance for its distinctive and compelling use of the game and its emotional honesty.

Previous titles under consideration:


On Legacy and Dan Barber's The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

In May of 1962, President John F. Kennedy went to Congress with an immense request: allocate the funds for and approve the program to send a man to the moon and return him safely. This would be an astronomical undertaking, one that Kennedy acknowledged would be the most difficult and most expensive goal the country had ever worked toward, and the clock was ticking: Kennedy wanted the United States to get it done before the end of the decade.


I think about this all the time. Not because of the mystery of the moon or the conspiracy around the landing or even the complex global politics that led to Kennedy's decision; instead, I think about the kind of leadership on display when a President sets a goal that almost certainly would not be accomplished during his term. Even if he had not tragically been assassinated in 1963, and had been elected to a second term, Kennedy would not have been President in 1969, when Apollo 11 proved him right. He decided that our nation should commit to this effort, and he was willing to secure the money (in today's dollars around $200 billion) and human resources to make it happen, and when the big moment came, it would be during someone else's administration.


What was extraordinary then is unthinkable now as those in power often make decisions based only on the next election-cycle or fiscal year reporting, unable or unwilling to cast a larger vision. Thankfully, there are those still looking long, considering the possibilities ahead of us and how to achieve the best version of them. Dan Barber is one of those thinkers.



Toward the beginning of The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, the Barber quotes near-legendary soil conservationist Wes Jackson, cofounder of The Land Institute (and longtime friend of Wendell Berry). Jackson had at the time been working on a perennial wheat, one that used to exist but had been agricultured out of existence, and when Barber pushes him on his timeline, Jackson responds:

If you're working on a problem you can solve in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough.

That quote alone might be enough to convince you to pick up this remarkable book, one that ranges from the soil, to the land, the sea, and the seeds, all or which make up the past, present, and future of our food systems. As a chef, Barber is uniquely concerned with flavor, with the role restaurants can play - and should play - in redefining American cuisine. But whether your interest is in fine dining or home gardening and cooking, or perhaps even global hunger in an increasingly dry and hot world, this book is a must-read.


Barber undoubtedly knows a lot; however, he models for the reader an intense curiosity, one that is always open to learning more, to seeing how someone else would approach a problem, to engaging with multiple perspectives in a fair and nonjudgmental way. In this way, his book is markedly different from the more agenda-driven narratives that often populate this genre. He is learning, and he invites you to learn along with him.


That said, he is an extraordinary teacher, making complex subjects clear and building compelling arguments without ever feeling heavy-handed. When he describes the Spanish dehesa land that has been stewarded for centuries and still produces the world-renowned jamón, you feel like you are walking beside him and hearing Miguel explain:

It's very much a question of values, not just value. That's what explains how the traditional farmers and producers have behaved for generations, and why still today they put tradition, nature, or instinct before technology, choosing to produce better, not just more.

And then you, too, can envision what it would look like if American growers could adopt those values, could see, as the farmers in Spain do, that planting new oaks to replenish natural loss is just what you do, not "for personal gain -- in their own lifetimes those trees will never produce an acorn." They plant because generations before them planted, and generations to come will need those trees to continue the work they've been doing for centuries.


In this way, the space race is not a good analogy. It was, at the time, something utterly new, a bold reckoning with a possible future; but in other ways, the idea works: to accomplish something remarkable, we have to think about legacy. We must consider what we can do now that will make things possible in the future, even if, perhaps especially if, we won't be around to see the outcomes or to receive any credit.


That's just one of many thought-provoking ideas that this book has on offer. If you have any interest in food, cooking, eating, growing things, the environment, agriculture, climate change, or the ocean, you should probably read this book. It is arrestingly well-written, thoughtful without being dense, and an excellent reminder that we have so much work to do.

bottom of page