Raven Gets Tricked (Coast Salish Tales)

Written and illustrated by Andrea Fritz

Orca Book Publishers

978-1459836273

32 pp.

Ages 6-8

September 2024

 

Andrea Fritz of the Lyackson First Nation brings us a new story for her Coast Salish Tales series, continuing to connect young readers to the teachings of the Coast Salish peoples through storytelling. 

It's winter and Smuy (little deer in the Hul'q'umi'num' language) finds his food stores empty except for some berries. When he realizes that he always shares with his cousin Spaal' (raven) who never reciprocates but often tricks Smuy instead, Smuy concocts a plan.

From Raven Gets Tricked, written and illustrated by Andrea Fritz

Smuy's plan begins with mashing up his remaining berries and pouring them out onto the snow beneath Spaal's tree. When Spaal' sees the red snow and asks Smuy to share it, Smuy does so. But Spaal' needed more space for this wonderful red snow so deposits his dried salmon and leaves it on the beach. While Spaal' continues to help himself to the red snow and even trying to hide that he'd taken more than his share, Smuy helps himself to the discarded salmon. 

Back after a night near Spaal's fire, all the red snow melts and floods his house. Smuy kindly takes Spaal' to his house and feeds him salmon, and even gives him some to take home as all his food is now gone. (At least Spaal' thanks Smuy with "Huy ch q'u!")

From Raven Gets Tricked, written and illustrated by Andrea Fritz

Between the art and the story, Andrea Fritz teaches, entertains, and delights with Raven Gets Tricked. The story has much to say about greed and sharing, self-sufficiency and helping others. It never occurs to Spaal', the raven who is known as a trickster, that he should think of others. He wants what he wants, never sharing–except when tricked into it–but always wanting from others, never wondering if they need something more than he. He asks, he takes, and he holds. Smuy, on the other hand, needs food. Whether his stores were always inadequate or because he shared with others or whether someone like Spaal' stole from him is irrelevant. I don't know why he didn't just ask but I suspect he knew that Spaal' would have many excuses not to share. Regardless, Andrea Fritz has created two very different characters. She makes Spaal' the selfish and manipulative creature upon whom misfortune occurs because of his own greed and Smuy, the kind animal who is compelled to reciprocate trickery but still shows goodness to help another.

From Raven Gets Tricked, written and illustrated by Andrea Fritz

Andrea Fritz even differentiates the two animals in the style of her art. Using a lovely and generously emotive Woodland style of art, Andrea Fritz gives Smuy a softness while Spaal' is somewhat sharper in shape and line. Of course, with a beak and talons, there is more sharpness to a raven, but the little deer looks lithe and muscular and still delicate. Moreover, Andrea Fritz's illustrations take us beyond the two characters, placing us in a northern environment of coniferous trees, laden with snow, purple and blue waters, and wooden plank houses. (The grain of the wood is reflected in many surfaces, from water and beach to sky and land.)

The story in Raven Gets Tricked offers a lesson in sharing but Andrea Fritz takes that teaching a step further by appending it with a discussion of Coastal Salish Plank Houses. She shares her personal experiences of building plank houses and even moving them to foraging grounds in the summer. Along with time spent in the houses, there is discussion about sharing and trading with local Nations.

Spuy may have to trick Spaal' in order to get food to survive but the little deer still does it with kindness and generosity, a lesson Spaal' should have learned.

 

• • • • • • •

 

Coast Salish Tales by Andrea Fritz

Otter Doesn't Know (2023)

Crow Helps a Friend (2024)

Raven Gets Tricked (2024)

Woolly Dog Warms His Family (expected 2025 or 2026)

Night Runners

Written and illustrated by Geraldo Valério

Groundwood Books

978-1-77306-569-4

52 pp.

Ages 3-6

October 2022

Who needs words when art can say so much? Geraldo Valério is one of our most accomplished wordless picture book author-illustrators, telling rich stories in the natural world with a luxuriance of colour and shape and teeming with interaction that supersedes words. Night Runners is his newest.

From Night Runners by Geraldo Valério

In Night Runners, a stag–with a messenger bag–bounds across a field into a coniferous forest, lured by a shining circlet of stars in the sky. There are many downed trees and just as the stag turns to check out the possibility of wolves, he stumbles on a fallen tree and injures its leg. As the tearful deer lays there, waiting for the wolves to come and slay it, something amazing happens. The wolves do arrive, but they encircle the deer, and bring it water and foraged food, and even wrap the wound with leaves. 

From Night Runners by Geraldo Valério

Together they follow the beacon of stars to a gathering of animals around a fire. All animals are represented, from moose and beaver, dragonfly and rooster, snake and skunk, and they all welcome the wolves and stag to their company. But when the stag opens his bag, the gathering becomes a true party of song and dance, and the circle of stars becomes a sky filled with brilliant stellar orbs.

Geraldo Valério's message of finding unexpected friends, even among those most feared, is a compelling one, especially for our times. The deer expects the worst when faced with a potential enemy but instead finds compassion and companionship. And together they discover something even more powerful and add to it with their presence.

From Night Runners by Geraldo Valério

Geraldo Valério's story fills the reader with hope for respect and humanity, something desperately needed nowadays. We need to know that good can happen in the midst of tragedy and Geraldo Valério makes us feel that promise for goodness and empathy. His striking artwork, rendered in acrylic paint and coloured pencil on watercolour paper, gives us that hope, with the boldness of colour and line bringing the power of his story to the eyes.  The stars that shine are for everyone and, with his diversity of animals, both domestic and not, Geraldo Valério makes sure that everyone can be part of this story.

All the Things We Leave Behind

Written by Riel Nason

Goose Lane Editions

978-0-864-920416

240 pp.

Ages 14+

September 2016

There are so many incidents that can stand out small and don’t seem like anything at the time but end up meaning so much.  There are so many tiny twists in a life that you can never know the ultimate significance of. (pg. 80)

As teen Violet Davis looks back through her copious memories of incidents with her older brother Bliss and their parents, she now seems to see the significance of them with respect to his disappearance from their lives after graduation from high school.  There were all the signs of a wanderlust for moving beyond their small town of Riverbend and Hawkshaw, New Brunswick, for travel, for adventure.  There was also the darkness in Bliss that may have been triggered when the two first discovered the Department of Transportation’s gruesome boneyard of deer and moose road kills, perhaps Bliss’s “first proof of unhappy endings” (pg. 116) but this melancholy could not be repressed.

It seemed that every bad memory, in fact only bad memories, bubbled up in his brain.  His entire perspective changed and every thought he had was permeated and tainted, shifted and reinterpreted in a negative way. (pg. 116)

Now it’s the summer of 1977 and Violet’s parents are ostensibly on vacation, but really in search of  any evidence of Bliss’s travels.  And Violet has been left in charge of the family business, officially known as Charles J. Davis & Son Antiques but known locally and by all travellers as The Purple Barn, a roadside attraction and store brimming with crafty twig furniture and quilts and antiques and collectibles.

For Violet, the summer is more than just working at The Purple Barn, and keeping the busybody employee Mrs. Quinn in check; it’s also a time of hanging with her boyfriend Dean and best friend Jill and her boyfriend Johnny.  While her brother’s disappearance is always foremost in her mind, as she rethinks what she should have and could have done to keep him from leaving them behind, Violet is forced to struggle with two unrelated issues.  First, she must negotiate the purchase of the contents of the renowned Vaughn cottage, a grand home deserted after the drowning of the owners' grandson. Secondly, Violet is haunted by a white buck that no one else seems to see.  Is it Speckles, a piebald deer Bliss befriended years earlier,  or an apparition that is part of the rumoured ghost herd of the boneyard?

Riel Nason’s first book, multi-award winning The Town That Drowned (Goose Lane Editions, 2011), was a deeply moving examination of a small town dealing with its impending demise by deliberate flooding.  That community, Haventon, is now a memory in All the Things We Leave Behind, both as place and experience, but only one of many things left behind when people move, or die, or disappear.  Those things can be like the goods that The Purple Barn sells from estates or deserted houses, or the mementoes set to be bequeathed to family upon a grandmother’s death.  Or they can be people, like Violet, left behind when a brother goes exploring, or when someone dies.  It can even be the bones of the dead or their ghosts remaining to haunt people’s thoughts and dreams and nightmares.  The concept of things, including people, being left behind is a monumental one but one that Riel Nason addresses with sensitivity and completeness, understanding the nature of memories and mementoes as powerful beyond reason.

Having a reminder, a souvenir, to help you remember is great, but I think the best memories are through a special door in your mind that you can open without a key. (pg. 105)

Riel Nason’s writing, both intricate and profound in addressing the nature of loss and memory, does not dwell on grief, though the boneyard and the tragic deaths of the animals and people in the book are disturbing.  But, All the Things We Leave Behind is bigger and better than just that, instead becoming a souvenir in itself, one of  weighty contemplation and yearning for a past remembered and a future unlocked.  Even with the tragedies that unfold in All the Things We Leave Behind, there is a lightness and brightness in the darkness, and acknowledgement by Riel Nason that all the things we leave behind, tangible and intangible, become powerful tributes in their own ways.