(++++) WHEN LIFE GETS STICKY

One More Jar of Jam. By Michelle Sumovich. Illustrated by Gracey Zhang. Dial. $18.99.

     Love and loss are inextricably intermingled in One More Jar of Jam, and both are served with a leavening of hope – all in all, the recipe for a sweet book that affirms nature and family in equal measure. It starts as a celebration of a seven-year-old girl’s relationship with the mulberry tree behind her family’s house, with Michelle Sumovich telling the story in poetic prose that affirms nature and childhood alike: “there’s nowhere sweeter to sit/ than on branches, heavy with warm berries,” and, when those branches are fruit-laden, it is wonderful to shake them “until swollen fruit falls corner to corner/ on an old sheet, freckled with berry juice.” The tale continues as the girl’s father makes dozens of jars of mulberry jam for the family, for Grandma, “to sweeten neighbors’ bread,” and to indulge in for the sheer pleasure of enjoying Nature’s bounty.

     Then Sumovich darkens the story, and Gracey Zhang’s illustrations use a dimmer palette as well: this is a rural area where you can “hear the far-off coyote howl” and where strong storms sweep through in the night – one of them being powerful enough to shatter an old fruit tree and leave it “broken and cracked and done.” Now the sadness is as palpable as was the earlier enjoyment, with “summer [that] is fruitless and dry as toast,” and Sumovich and Zhang undertake the difficult task of helping young readers come to grips with this small tragedy – which does not seem small at all – and find ways to cope and move on, as the little girl at the center of the story finds she must do.

     After several dull treeless seasons pass, the girl and her dad and their dog sit on the tree stump – “you’ll gather/ those who miss it most” – and they “celebrate things/ that can no longer celebrate themselves.” And so the healing begins, with “flowers and a little cake” to affirm that “it’s enough/ just to grow,” and with the girl marking the tree ring for the year she was born (which is how readers learn that she is seven years old).

     And then Nature shows its power of revival: “suddenly silent, shiny leaves burst” from the stump and growth begins anew, as the book ends with the excited little girl happily waiting for, as the title clearly indicates, “one more jar of jam.”

     This is a sensitive, perhaps slightly cloying story of simple pleasures enjoyed, lost, and then regained – or expected to be regained. It does, however, have a couple of small missteps of which caring parents should be aware. The anticipatory ending is one of those: never is there a sense of how long it would take a mulberry tree to regrow from a stump, or how long after the initial growth the tree would bear fruit. That would actually make a good story in itself, showing the tree serving one generation, falling in a storm, and then eventually growing to serve the now-grown little girl’s own children or grandchildren. But that is not this story. And although the final page is nicely filled with pleasant anticipation of more jam, parents may need to explain gently to young children that trees take a long time to grow and an even longer one to bear fruit, so the seven-year-old in this book will be a great deal older when the tree again has mulberries – and will not necessarily be living in the same house or anywhere near it. That is a colder dose of real life than Sumovich and Zhang wish to offer, and it is understandable that they do not provide it. But real-world children who do not know just how Nature renews itself deserve to be informed – again, the watchword is “gently” – that the lovely conclusion of One More Jar of Jam is less than realistic.

     Also less than realistic, and perhaps a small misstep for some readers, is the book’s now-common virtue signaling: the girl protagonist is interracial, with a white father and black Grandma (there is no sign of her mother). In the real world, blacks make up 12.1% of the U.S. population, according to BlackDemographics.com, using U.S. Census Bureau data; and among married black women, 93% have a black husband and 4% have a white spouse. So the family composition here is very, very unlikely to represent the arrangement in the homes of most of the intended readers. There is nothing wrong with that at all: the intent is surely to advance tolerance and the universality of the book’s message, and nobody says that books can or should show only families resembling those of the children at whom the books are targeted. However, in books designed to provide emotionally driven teachable moments, anything that distracts young readers risks getting in the way of the intended lesson. Adults will know that the family structure here is highly unusual and will likely consider it irrelevant – but since it is in no way dictated by the needs of the story, it stands out as an assertion of values beyond those of the book’s central message of love, loss, change, grief, and eventual acceptance and hope. Those are topics quite big enough on their own without adding further societal elements to them. And those elements may indeed be insignificant for some children and some families. In case they are not, though, parents attracted by the very moving elements of One More Jar of Jam should be ready to answer children’s questions about the book’s characters, and prepared to find ways – consistent with their own family values – to redirect young children’s attention to the foundational message of the book and the warmth and sensitivity with which Sumovich and Zhang deliver it.