ABC 5. The Village of Round and Square Houses

For the first book for Anansi Book Club in June (see the website for more), we have a Caldecott Honor book for today (and the second book for June is also going to be a Caldecott-winner also); here's the book: The Village of Round and Square Houses, written and illustrated by Ann Grifalconi. It was published in 1986, and it's just a click away at the Internet Archive.

The author, Ann Grifalconi, was born in 1929, and died just two years ago, in 2020. You can find out more about her life and career at Wikipedia; here is her obituary in the New York Times. 

The story for the book was inspired by a trip Grifalconi made to Cameroon and a folktale that she heard in a village located in the foothills of one of the volcanoes of Cameroon; you can find out more about the Cameroon line of volcanoes at Wikipedia. 

The "story-within-the-story" of Grifalconi's book is about a volcanic eruption of long ago... and compare the 1986 disaster at Lake Nyos in the same region of Cameroon. In the village of Grifalconi's book, the people survived, but the village was changed forever:

And remember how there was an old educational video for The Rugmaker in last week's book? Well, there is an old educational video for this book, and with a lovely narrator. Here is the video at the Internet Archive: The Village of Round and Square Houses.

Grifalconi wrote two more books about this same village: Darkness and the Butterfly and Osa's Pride, both of which are available at Internet Archive.

Grifalconi also did the illustrations for James Berry's book, Don't Leave an Elephant to Go and Chase a Bird, which is based on an Anansi story from Ghana. (More about James Berry.)

I really like the way Grifalconi has depicted Anansi in this book: he's not quite human but not exactly a spider either.

Grifalconi both wrote and illustrated many books, including other books with African and African American themes; you can browse the Internet Archive for more:

And in addition to Grifalconi's books, I wanted to share this very creative drawing where she imagines Michelangelo's famous moment of creation with a gender flip: And God Created Woman in Her Own Image. (I found it online here at Quaker Thought and Life Today.) 

I also wanted to share this lovely YouTube video that I found of someone reading a Lucille Clifton poem-book illustrated by Grifalconi: Everett Anderson's Friend by Lucille Clifton and Ann Grifalconi.

I'll keep adding to this blog post each day of the week. Meanwhile, borrow the book from Internet Archive and see what you think, and maybe you'll want to share your thoughts at Twitter with the #AnansiBookClub hashtag!

The Village of Round and Square Houses

by Ann Grifalconi