After recently moving from my career-long home, hundreds of miles from my hometown, I am now located closer to many family members of many generations. In the past six weeks I've had more opportunities to enjoy their company (and their colorful personalities) than I've had in half a century. Most gathering during those visits were limited in time and interactions by focus on weddings, funerals, or annual holidays. In these less formal, more "ordinary" meetings, many recollections are being shared of childhood fun as cousins, of traditional gatherings, of shared (and contested) memories!
ABRAMS BOOKS For Young Readers, 2023
Perhaps that's why this new picture book appeals to me so much. SUMMER IS FOR COUSINS, written by Rajani LaRocca and illustrated by Abhi Alwar, is vibrant with color, personalities, connections, and extended-family-love. It also resonates with my own memories, of beaches and ice cream outings and shared cabins at the lake and rotating family turns to cook meals.
In LaRocca's contemporary picture book, these cousin-family traditions are showcased on the endpapers in seemingly-scrapbook-taped snapshots of game night, story time, campfires, broken limbs, identities and and very special cousin friendships. So familiar.
This particular family is, from the start, ethnically different from mine. Grandpa and Grandma are called Thatha and Pati, but I didn't need to speak another language or use Google-translate to know that. The text and illustrations retain distinctly authentic identities, diets, and details while resonating fully with the patterns of family lives that make the meaning immediately clear. Other things are labeled in recognizably generic language, kid-speak. For example, the shared vacation spot is not a wooded cabin or tent, but "a house that's not any of ours", as was our childhood gathering place. Kids leave such arrangements to their parents, yet assume that the summer ritual of gathering and celebrating the season together in a vacation spot WILL occur, even if not in the same place each year. They count on it.
In early pages the children are tagged with names, although not ones as common to my background as "Susie" or "Joey". No sense of distance from my llife, though, because their cartoonish enthusiasm and interactions are universally familiar. Each year's return reveals changes, the youngest no longer the youngest. A special friendship with an older cousin is a worrying risk to the first-person narrator, Ravi. Could his cousin have outgrown his interest in spending time with Ravi? His voice has changed, he is incredibly taller. Would he still enjoy their favorite flavor of ice cream, or share his older-guy interests, like paddleboarding.
Amid the many satisfying situations depicted in lively, action-packed illustrations and delightfully direct text, this tension of younger-Ravi's concern/hope is a thread that also recalled my experiences- always seeking the company of the older cousin rather than the younger one, hoping for affirmation that I was worthy of their continuing friendships, or at least their awareness.
This is much more than a nostalgic mirror of a fun childhood summer, though. The dynamic of these cousins actually forms a dramatic throughline for Ravi to prove his theory that their special friendship has overcome their age/size differences. When the kids claim a night of dinner prep, Ravi sets out to test his cousin, to see if they still share the same favorite flavor of ice cream. I love his proactive approach and also his appealing decision to make the ice cream himself. Foodies, rejoice in this example of kids cooking and turning "making" into play!
There is plenty to enjoy in this new picture book, for early readers, their families, and even those of us out here on the elder branches of our family trees. Apart from the affirmative values of shared family time, meals at the table, outdoor play, intergenerational activities, and family traditions, this is an ideal example of the power to both provide lesser-published mirrors for those with non-western identities and open windows for others. It's a potent example of the ways in which "Same": and "Different" are utterly inadequate terms in a complex society such as we inhabit. Ours is a society (*most of USA) in which we live in neighborhoods that are siloed. A book like this takes our occasional and often limited contacts with people we might see only in "roles" at school or in retail or business settings beyond those artificial boundaries into their lives. Lives so much like our own. What a priceless gift that is, to those who rarely see themselves in such books, and even more to those who rarely see those lives in real life. Check it out at your library or invest a few bucks for a book that will be a treasure across generations. You'll be making memories!
For families with older kids, check out Rajani LaRocca's Newbery Honor title, RED, WHITE, and WHOLE, a phenomenal read involving the ongoing stress of strict family expectations in conflict with the immersive social patterns of a broader community. It's another loving family tale, but one immersed in the stresses of daily work and school life with the added burden of serious illness.
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