I had a lot of fun with this guest post for YA Books Central. We were asked to recommend three diverse books and discuss what we liked about them. This is a monthly column that I’m sharing with authors Maurene Goo (Since You Asked…) and Brandy Colbert (Pointe).
You can find my blog post here.
If you’d like to read Maurene’s recommendations, they’re here.
Happy reading!
Just wanted to share this history of We Need Diverse Books that I wrote for the Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database. It was fun to look back and see how far we’ve come. From a hashtag to a movement to a non-profit working hard for inclusiveness in children’s literature.
When I was 12 years old, I nearly died.
At the time, my two older sisters and I lived with our mom in the San Bernardino Mountains, about 2 hours east of Los Angeles. It was Easter Sunday, and we’d gone to visit my grandmother in L.A. for Spring Break. Grandma and Papa had dropped us off at the bus station in downtown L.A., and Mom came to pick us up at the bus depot in San Bernardino.
My mom, God love her, was a terrible driver. She was a lead-foot, not only on the gas, but on the brake as well. She drove “down the hill” (from nearly mile-high Blue Jay to San Berdoo’s thousand foot elevation) screaming around those mountain curves, most likely with her foot on the brake most of the way.
She picked us up at the bus depot, me and my sisters still wearing our Easter dresses. We tucked our luggage and our basket of Easter eggs in the trunk, then Mom headed back up the hill. My older sister Debbie sat in the middle of the car’s bench front seat next to Mom, and I sat next to Debbie by the door. Our oldest sister, Linda, sat behind me in the back seat.
Mom might have used less brake going up, but the brake drum nevertheless got hotter and hotter until about halfway up the hill, the heat actually blew a tire. We pulled into a nice, level turnout and a kind passerby changed the tire for us. The gentleman told my mom she better let the brakes cool before continuing on home. We sat around for what Mom thought was long enough, then pulled out again.
I don’t remember if there was a smell, or Mom could feel the heat through the brake pedal. In any case, she decided to pull over into another turnout and let the brakes cool again.
Except this turnout was sloped. The car started rolling backwards. The brakes were well and truly fried and no amount of stomping on Mom’s part would get that car to stop. The car just kept rolling toward the edge where the mountainside plunged down a couple hundred feet of steep embankment.
For some reason, Mom didn’t think to try the emergency brake. I suppose it might not have worked anyway. She was struggling to put the car into park. When that didn’t work, she jumped out and tried to stop the car with her body. The car knocked her down and partially rolled over her. Not with its full weight because at that point, the rear of the car was already over the edge, so the front end was partially off the ground.
While Mom was fighting to stop the car, Debbie had gotten the passenger side door open and was yelling at me to get out. I remember sitting sideways, my feet hanging out of the car, watching the pavement roll by under my feet. But I was frozen. Debbie couldn’t get me to budge. All the while, Linda kept yelling from the back seat, “I can’t open the door! I can’t open the door!”
We were all about to die. And then a miracle happened.
The car stopped. Linda got her door open, I finally scrambled out of the car with Debbie close on my heels. When we turned back to the car, we realized it had stopped with one front tire hooked to the berm that edged the turnout. That berm wasn’t even a foot high.
Mom was banged up but nothing was broken or needed stitches. We three girls were perfectly fine. The car was towed out of its predicament, and it went on to suffer through more of my mom’s abuse. The Easter eggs ended up rotting in the trunk because we all forgot they were in there, a fact that we girls chortled over for years to come.
Yeah. A miracle. That my mom wasn’t hurt more badly. That we girls didn’t flip right over the edge, none of us seat-belted into that pre-airbag car. That Debbie and I didn’t bail, and the car didn’t flip with Linda trapped inside. All those possibilities make me shudder now.
Oddly enough, as dramatic as this experience was, I’ve never used it in a book. I’ve probably used the fear, the panic, the horror of it without consciously realizing where I might be pulling it from. It became a story that we all found hysterically funny because it did have a happy ending.
In this case, reality was much better than the what-ifs. Thanks to God and miracles.
Yesterday we had the kind of weather California is famous for. Gorgeous. So what could be lovelier than a trail ride soaking up all that wonderful sun?
Yeah, I know, those of you still shivering in the clutches of winter are probably scowling at me. And some of you might be saying, “What? She has a horse? Some people have all the luck.”
Yes, I’m majorly lucky. That little guy I’m riding is Maxx (two X’s since he’s extra special), my new Morgan gelding. Adorable to the…max. And super-fab as a trail horse.
That round, beige thing at the bottom of the picture, by the way, is Fiona’s butt. Fiona is a Haflinger. She belongs to the friend who went with me on the trail ride. Here’s Fiona’s other end.
Yes, I feel blessed. By the beautiful day, by the cute little Morgan I’m riding, by the chance to ride out on the trail with a friend.
I hope you’ve got some blessings to count too.
Since I live out in the boonies, and countryside even boonier is close at hand, I have the opportunity to see plenty of critters that all you city folk don’t. For instance, I regularly see deer (aka, rodents with hoofs), red-tail hawk, the rare bald eagle, beaver, wild turkey, and peacocks. Okay, that last one is just a bizarre fluke since they don’t really belong in my boonies, they’ve just been brought in and set loose by someone.
In addition to the wild critters, there are any number of domesticated and semi-domesticated animals close at hand. Horses and cattle and goats, of course, but also emus, a zebra, bison, and lovely little alpaca.
Good friends of mine own a ranch called Bluestone Meadow up in an area of Northern California known as Apple Hill. They grow pumpkins in the fall and scrumptious, fragrant lavender year-round. They’re developing a Christmas tree farm. They have this amazing trebuchet they use to fling pumpkins with during pumpkin season.
They’d been wanting to add alpaca to their farm, and found four females at a ranch where the breeder was selling out her stock. I was about to sell my horse trailer, but I took it on one last haul up to Grass Valley.
It was very entertaining watching them wrangle the “girls” onboard. Alpaca don’t exactly lead as willingly as a horse (at least these didn’t–they were a bit rusty). But what’s cool is that when alpaca ride in a trailer, they “cush” (if I’ve got the spelling right). They lie down, which makes them much easier to transport than horses.
Once the first two were in, the second two should have been a piece of cake. But while the third alpaca hopped right in, the final one had to be persuaded. It took a little wrassling, lifting her front feet onto the trailer bed to persuade her back feet to follow. But then even she was inside, and we were ready to head out.
They traveled pretty well (although a few times, I wondered if one or more of them had un-cushed because the trailer was rocking) and after backing the trailer into the pasture gate, they all exited and explored their new digs. I took a couple of videos, one of them wandering about, and one of the smallest girl, Foxy, meeting Jake, one of their the Bluestone Meadow dogs.
http://youtu.be/oUZiqJtcmXY
http://youtu.be/21x9DOLZrtg
A footnote about Jake. He was obsessed with these new giant creatures and managed to make his way into the pasture while my friends were away. When my friends found him and got him out again, he was covered with stinky alpaca spit. I hope he learned his lesson.