“The Red Garden,” Alice Hoffman
In her created town of Blackwell, Hoffman writes short vignettes following the founding of the town until the 1980s–from the woman who saved the original families, to their descendants 300 years later, intertwining their stories but not their memories. Her stories expose something I find to be very true about the U.S.; mainly, that most of us (principally white people) have forgotten where we came from, be it England or any other place from Europe. And not only have we forgotten where we came from, but like the characters in this story, we have forgotten our family histories as well, knowing almost nothing of those who came before us. I find this especially true in my family, and identified with this voluntary memory loss portrayed throughout the book, as the characters struggle to fit in in a town that their ancestors founded, if only they thought to remember it.
“The Little Prince,” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
For Spanish, and probably most European people, it seems incredible that I hadn’t read The Little Prince until now: for all its popularity in Europe, it is not read so much in the U.S., even though it was written in New York! It is about a man (not unlike the author himself) who crashes his plane in the desert and comes upon a little boy who calls himself a prince of a faraway planet. The prince tells him his story, and many pieces of advice for the reader are tucked into the narrative, the most important one being that “Grownups never understand” and everything must always be explained to them. As we age, I think we lose much of our open-mindedness, acceptance, and flexibility, and this small book is a reminder of the importance of thinking like a child at times.