By Kevin Noble Maillard
A big noisy family makes fry bread together, and every spread finishes the sentence a different way: fry bread is food, is shape, is sound, is history, is us.
A grandmother rolls out dough and the whole family piles into the kitchen. That's the whole plot, and it's enough. The book works by finishing one sentence over and over. Fry bread is food, so there's flour and salt and the shape of the dough. Fry bread is sound, so there's the sizzle. Fry bread is color, and the children around the table are brown and tan and black and pale, because Native families look like that. Fry bread is place, and fry bread is nation, and by the time you get to fry bread is us, your child has met a family that is loud and modern and eating together on a Saturday. The endpapers are covered edge to edge with the names of hundreds of Native nations, and there is a real recipe at the back that works.
It puts a Native family in the present tense, in a kitchen, right now, with a cousin hogging the good chair. That sounds small and it isn't. Most children meet Native people first in a history unit, in the past, wearing something, and then never again, and this book steps directly in front of that. Nobody in it is explaining themselves to your child. They're just making dinner, and your child is at the table.