Many families I know are cutting summer road trips due to the highest gas prices many of us have ever seen. That’s especially sad given this national semiquincentennial should be the year of extra roadtrips to visit historical and commemorative sites and activities. The United States has such breathtakingly distinct landscapes, completely unlike any other place in the world.
Even those whose inflation-decimated budgets can still accommodate road trips will appreciate the opportunity to take a special one through history with their children or grandchildren for less than it costs to fill up our best-gas-mileage car in these days of ominous $4.50 gallons. The massive new commemorative volume, The American Book of Fables by Matthew Mehan and illustrated by John Folley, motors imaginations through America old and new. It’s out May 19, but you can preorder now, and that helps the book gain visibility with other readers!
Fables is a fanciful, illustrated family American history reader. Mehan surrounds an extremely good collection of original documents and excerpts from U.S. history with a frame narrative — that is, his original story about a collection of animals going on a quest across America that uncovers and embeds numerous documents, folk tales, and poems old and new. Folley illustrates this quest with beautiful sketches, oils, and watercolors.
This is a book big enough to reflect the United States’ breadth — more than an inch thick, in a gold-foil-stamped heirloom hardcover. Even so, I had to continually hunt for it among the places my children roam, because everyone from the five-year-old to the fourteen-year-old kept stealing it from my office. Take a look at it with the book trailer:
Truly, just looking at some of the artwork makes me tear up simply because of the distinctly American beauty it captures. America is a magnificent country, both geographically and in spirit. Just look at this:
That vast scope reminiscent of the country this book honors is present not just in the illustrations, but the text. The book reminds me of a grandpa’s scrapbook, if grandpas were the kind of people to keep scrapbooks. It’s a collection of pictures, tall tales, morality stories, witty sayings, poems, and historical documents. They are arranged both in loose chronological order from America’s discovery and in geographical order as the animals set out to cross the country to save parts of it.
Each section is also arranged from read-aloud items particularly for preschoolers through stories and historical documents particularly for older children and adults. It is quite the literary undertaking, an impressive offering of gratitude and reverence for our great country in its 250th birthday year. There’s so much here that it is hard to even start describing it, because each description only touches on a small part of the whole. On the book’s order page, you can take a virtual look inside.
One of its distinctive components is a series of tales adapted from Aesop with a distinctly American flair. These introduce readers not only to this part of our Western cultural and literary inheritance (bestowed by a likely African slave, no less, for those who are un-American enough to do more than merely notice race) but also expand and thereby illuminate the deep moralism at the heart of both Aesop and America’s core personality.
Americans have always been a Puritan people at heart. Our forefathers sourced this Puritanism from their Christian religion. Today, many contemporaries have distorted it into the heretical, competing religion of cultural Marxism. But you can’t understand America or even be an American without understanding and embodying our deep moralism that is Christian in soul, even in apostasy.
Aesop is a great fit for Mehan’s style, because Aesop’s moralism is entertaining, witty, more subtle than a sermon, and wry. It’s the kind of Puritanism that practices bundling (albeit here thankfully in a completely G-rated form), another very American habitude.
This is an adventure book through the land its readers inhabit: its people, its vistas, even its animals. You can tell Mehan traveled the United States to help write this book. His love, patriotism, and laughter are almost audible in the pages.
His strong sense of humor, storytelling, and adventure, combined with Folley’s lively, majestic illustrations, distinguish this book with a reassuring, teasing, and entertaining fatherly presence. That’s particularly notable in an era in which the feminine is very present in both children’s publishing and history instruction. It’s not something you can get from many other family books available today.
If someone who is inferior to the author and illustrator in craft may be permitted to make a critique, I’ll admit I am not a lover of animal frame narratives. Unlike Mehan, and despite earning an English major with honors at the college where he teaches, I do not have a whimsical mind. (My husband says I have no sense of humor; he may be right, except I do laugh!) I prefer to get my history more straightforwardly, such as from the also extremely good Land of Hope series, or David McCullough biographies.
As such, my favorite part of this book is the many wondrous historical documents embedded inside. They are letters, quotes, speeches, memoirs, stories, newspaper clippings, and jokes from Americans famous and obscure, as well as selections from the annals of Western heritage that have so greatly influenced the character, ways of life, and thoughts of those who built and maintain our country. These include excerpts from the Bible, Cicero, Pliny the Elder, and so on. Hardly anything is better, in my mind, to develop one’s understanding of and love for the ancestors who have given us the best country in world history, the sacrifices they made to do so, and the habits of mind required for it all.
Happily, my rigid, fact-focused preferences do not seem to have descended (yet?) to my much sillier children, who love whimsy and goofiness. (I do not know how that happened, as their father is also not a very silly man; except he will insist on making puns as often as he can. Therefore he gets all the blame.) They are not only not bothered by animal frame narratives, they are positively attracted by the illustrations that show these animals having all sorts of American adventures throughout this large book.
I am sure that is part of Mehan’s artifice. Some of us may want to get “right to the meat” and bypass all the condiments and salad dressings, but others of us take our meat best with the dressing. There is plenty of dressing in Fables to go around, and I can testify that it does bring all the children to the table. That’s especially lovely in the moments when I want to share with them something tasty, in this case, for their souls.
Mr. Mehan’s animal world extends to several other lovely picture books, including about “mythical mammals,” that I recommend as baby shower gifts, birthday or Christmas presents, summer reading prizes, and the like. But this volume of Misters Mehan and Folley is best fit for celebrating America’s birthday with those you love best. With it, you can do so in a fitting, breath-taking expedition through time and space without ever leaving home.
Although I received a free review copy, I also preordered another copy on Amazon to give to my children’s school library. This will probably be my gift of the year to all our godchildren as well. If you know you’re going to order several, like I am, get them all this week to train the algorithm so others who want to share high-quality, non-propaganda, pro-America history with their families will see it in their recommendations!
