“Close enough to hear the cameleers’ campfire snap”

“Well, then, that’s so. What we see with our hearts is often far truer than what we see with our eyes.” 

Lurie Mattie is an orphan.  While fleeing a marshal who has a warrant for his arrest, he hides himself among a group of soldiers traveling west with a herd of camels. Eventually he parts ways with this group but gains a new traveling companion in Burke. Theirs is a journey of rivers which Lurie chronicles by drops added to his canteen throughout the pages of Inland by Téa Obreht.

Meanwhile in the Arizona Territory, Nora and Emmett Lark have been trying to subsist on a desert homestead by running a community newspaper. They soon find themselves in the center of the controversy of where the county seat should be established.  As the day of this novel unfolds, Nora slowly realizes that her husband and sons have been caught up in the violence of this controversy. As she is trying to figure out their whereabouts, Nora is also desperately trying to find water as their household is literally down to the last dipperful. Adding to the chaos is the appearance of a mysterious beast which only the most unreliable members of her household have claimed to see.

Having just been charmed by Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, I was delighted to find similar twists of magical realism, tenacity, and humor in her latest work. 

“ 'Where in all of Christendom did you get a camel?’ she said. ‘Texas.’ There was no truer answer.”

"this bearded, prophetic figure in sandals walks in"

Reading this article about Sesame Street, reminded me of this post I wrote back in 2016.

Taking on a new reading challenge this year found me in the biography section of our new library. Having just watched this movie with my kids, I was drawn to Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones. 

Starting with Henson's childhood, Jones illustrates both the nurturing influences of his fun-loving cast of extended relatives and the natural influences of a childhood spent exploring the creeks of Mississippi. An early fan of television, Henson soon sought out ways to appear on the small screen. He found an opening through puppetry and would spend the rest of his life fighting a reputation of being a children's performer.

Since I spent many of my own childhood afternoons watching repeats of this Muppet movie and introduced my own daughter to television with YouTube clips of this show, I was fascinated by reading the chapters outlining the debut of Miss Piggy’s karate chop and Fozzie’s bad stand-up jokes.

Even more striking, though, is the sheer amount of projects Henson was able to work on at one time. Although there are numerous accounts of Henson's gentle nature in directing these projects, Jones also points out Henson’s characteristic “whim of steel” that allowed many of his projects from The Muppet Show to Labyrinth to go forward.  

Fans of Fraggle Rock or The Dark Crystal will learn much about the script writing and creature crafting of these shows in reading this book. But they will also learn a lot about the determination, charisma, and joys of the man behind their creations.