Betsy Bird at Fuse #8 is rightfully mourning the relative dearth of African folktale publishing and simultaneously celebrating one of its legends from the glory days, Verna Aardema. All I can say is God bless Verna Aardema, who knew just how to write a picture-book text that would bring any library story hour to life. Authentic? Not especially; as Barbara Bader wrote for us back in 2007, “in writing picture books, with their special needs, [Aardema] did more than adapt the stories — she pretty much remade them.” But she did something else, too: “Aardema lit upon juicy stories, in a variety of forms, from a number of tribal cultures. In her hands, they didn’t sound alike, and with a judicious selection of illustrators by Atha Tehon and other art directors, they didn’t look alike. Heterogeneous and vigorously alive, Aardema’s improbable body of work was absorbed into the omni-American experience.”

I don’t know if #weneeddiversebooks would characterize Aardema’s as counting as such, but here’s hoping folktale publishing can get a bump from somewhere. While the meta-hijinks begun years ago  by the Jolly Postman and his bratty little brother Stinky Cheese show no signs of abatement, the publishing of traditional tales has been, as Betsy points out, largely left to smaller houses. Holly Hobbie has just published a very beautiful “Hansel and Gretel” with Little, Brown, and what’s so surprising about it is its utter lack of divergence from Grimm. I kept expecting to see Little Red Riding Hood hove into view or a joke about vegan gingerbread or something. Northrop Frye says irony is supposed to lead us back into myth but HOW LONG MUST WE WAIT?

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