Review of the Day: Go Forth and Tell by Breanna J. McDaniel, ill. April Harrison

Go Forth and Tell: The Life of Augusta Baker, Librarian and Master Storyteller
By Breanna J. McDaniel
Illustrated by April Harrison
Dial Books for Young Readers (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
$18.99
ISBN: 9780593324202
Ages 4-7
On shelves now

Let’s talk a bit about what happens when picture book biographies preach to the choir. I am talking, of course, about that phenomenon of featuring heroic librarians in children’s books. We see this in fictional picture books all the time where there is often some story about a librarian that made all the difference in a child’s life. There is nothing inherently wrong in such books, it’s just that who’s buying a chunk of these titles? The librarians themselves, of course. Even more so when the book is nonfiction, since most informational books are passed over by bookstores. So it is that the librarians buy the books about librarians for kids. So has has ever been. So it will ever be. It means that whenever I see a book like Go Forth and Tell which focuses on the late great Augusta Baker, I (a librarian myself) don’t just approach it with a grain of salt. I come at it with a whole chunk of the stuff. In a way, this makes it a little more difficult for a perfectly decent book to burst through my defenses and impress me. But since I already knew the story of Augusta Baker, Go Forth and Tell already had a leg up by featuring someone as impressive as she. Add in a great text and art from the illustrious April Harrison and you’ve got on your hands a librarian biography that’s a cut above the rest. A book that surpasses its form. A tale worth telling.

Born in Baltimore, young Augusta was a keen fan of storytelling in all its iterations. Enamored of stories and storytelling, she took that passion into teacher’s college. Then, in a surprising turn of events, she turned her sights to librarianship. In Harlem, at the 135th Street Branch, she began her time as a librarian, noticing too how few books published for kids contained Black characters and stories that weren’t out-and-out offensive. Her purpose clear, she set about promoting the books and authors that deserved attention for their, “honest, caring depictions of Black folks.” And as her work progressed, so did her career, inspiring others and the book industry itself. Backmatter includes a timeline of Augusta’s life, a list of Citations, and a touching Author’s Note that serves the dual purpose of explaining why Breanna McDaniel wrote this book as well as honoring her own childhood librarian Ms. Michelle Carnes.

No fool she, Breanna McDaniel knew that the key to this book was not to lean into the librarian aspects of Baker’s life right at the get-go. If the first sentence of this book was, “Augusta Braxton Baker grew up to be a master librarian” you would hear the tell-tale flap of covers being closed all around this fair country of ours. Instead, the sentence reads, “Augusta Braxton Baker grew up to be a master storyteller.” Much more universal. A smart move. If you’ll notice, that pairing of “storyteller” alongside “librarian” is the key to the book. Particularly when you lean into the fact that Baker lived in an era when not everyone’s stories were being told.

I worked as a New York Public Library children’s librarian for around eleven years. At the time, NYPL was very invested in teaching its incoming librarians about the history of the institution. Augusta Baker, the first Black woman to serve as the Coordinator of Children’s Services, was definitely mentioned but I didn’t really know much about her. I was familiar with her James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at the 135th Street Branch, though I didn’t really know that Ms. Baker had created it. In the book, all of this is covered in the text, not just the backmatter, and it includes a rather impressive image of all the libraries in New York City. In the illustration, Ms. Baker sits beside this map, and it’s correctly color coordinated to make it clear that there are three different library systems (NYPL, Brooklyn and Queens). If I were a stickler I could see whether or not all the branches listed truly existed at the time of her work as Coordinator, but that feels a bit ridiculous. It’s enough to know that the creators of this book cared for my old employer and did it due diligence on the page. The book may be aware that storytelling is the way to entice younger readers but it’s no fool. We come for the storytelling. We stay for the librarianship.

Not that that guarantees a good book. I read loads of new picture book biographies in a given year and let me tell you that a whole slew of people sure as heck that think they can write them. They can too… technically. It’s just that a lot of them are pretty samey. Decent but, quite frankly, dull. To write a biography well you ideally write about the subject matter while also writing about something bigger that that person was a part of. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: Listen to these last lines of Go Forth and Tell, “There, under trees and tents with food and friends, griots and authors tell tales, shining a bright light and painting a more brilliant, bold world with their words.” See, now that is how you end one of these titles. It doesn’t sound like a school assignment on a famous person. It sounds like a work of literature. And happily it doesn’t come out of nowhere. McDaniel understands that the key to this telling is the universality of a person’s life, as it applies to others. It’s about how this person affects not simply people at the time, but people in the future as well.

I’ve always found April Harrison’s art style to be interesting. It’s not to everyone’s taste, I suppose, but it has a raw honesty to it that I’ve always appreciated. The publication page just says that she works in “mixed media collage, acrylics and artist pens” but that’s too a simple an explanation for art that doesn’t feel simple. Let’s just look at this cover for starters. The image we have of Baker here is one in which her hands are accentuated and made large. She’s in the middle of telling a story, a pile of books visible in one hand. The typography of the title, the positioning of the subtitle, and even the way in which the author and illustrator’s names have been boxed at the bottom all indicate a carefully thought out process. Inside, the texture of the paper on which Harrison paints often works its way into the art, giving a three-dimensional quality to some of these images. Harrison’s faces remind me a bit of how Bryan Collier does them too. Often they’re not the focus of her work. That said, there were a couple faces here I particularly enjoyed. On the second page of this book you see a young Augusta kneeling next to a woman telling her a story. The expression on her face, with its sly eyes and cocked eyebrow looks like she knows the woman talking to her is pulling her leg, but she’s willing to go along with it. It’s the background papers and patterns that are the true draw, though. People are great. The papers that are used are better.

At the height of Augusta Baker’s time at NYPL librarians were the driving force when it came to purchasing children’s literature. There were no big box stores or online retailers, and very few bookstores per capita. There were, however, a lot of libraries and those libraries had children’s rooms. That meant that librarians had a surprising hold over the children’s book publishing industry. They wanted folktales and they got them. They wanted fairy tales and they got them. These days that sway is almost entirely gone, except perhaps in one key respect. Bookstores and online retailers still don’t quite know what to do with nonfiction for kids. Walk into any bookstore and locate the nonfiction children’s book section. It’s almost always scant, at best. Walk into a children’s library and shelves and shelves are dedicated to informational texts for kids. As a result, the old power that librarians one wielded over all of children’s literature has been concentrated into this one specific area. That is, honestly, why books like Go Forth and Tell are able to get published. This subject is important in and of itself, but if it were solely reliant on the public and bookstores to purchase it, it would flail a bit in sales. So I may scoff a little at books that lean into the heroic librarian model, but when the subject deserves it, as Augusta Baker does, then I am grateful for the way things are. I am grateful that we get to see a book like Go Forth and Tell on our shelves in this day and age. And finally I am grateful that Breanna McDaniel, who knows how to tell a story about a storyteller, and that April Harrison, who knows how to bring that story to visible life, were the ones who got to tell this story.

On shelves now.

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2024, Review 2024, Reviews