| Abish From the series: My First Scripture Stories By Sherrie Johnson Illustrated by Mark McCune Deseret Book, 1996. Softcover. |
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| Ammon and the King From the series: My First Scripture Stories By Sherrie Johnson Illustrated by Tyler Lybbert Deseret Book, 1994. Softcover. |
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| Reviewed by: Harlow S. Clark, on 6/18/1996 | |
First some background
One of the requirements for an A in Dean Hughes’s Writing for Children class was to submit something for publication. That was back when Steve Christensen was doing the Sunday School Supplement in Sunstone, and in one issue he talked about the Apocrypha, including the story of Daniel, Bel and the Dragon. I liked the story and worked it into my story about a boy named Daniel who has a story-loving lion under his bed. I found a Methodist children’s magazine in Writer’s Market (I didn’t send it to The Friendbecause LDS Church magazines insist on buying all rights) and sent it off. I received a nice letter inviting further submissions, but explaining that the characters were a bit too young for their readers.
Several years later I rewrote “Daniel’s Lion.” In 1994 one of the editors for an LDS publisher was at the AML symposium recruiting new writers. In June of that year I took a copy of “Daniel’s Lion” to the Wasatch Review Writer’s Conference, hunted up the editor for that publisher and handed it over. A few months later I got a call from the editor, saying they liked the story and wanted to publish it. He asked me about illustrators, started looking at bids for printing, then hired on with another publisher. The new editor told me that they still wanted to publish the book, but suggested that, since we hadn’t signed a contract, I might want to submit it elsewhere, so I wasn’t surprised when she told me they had decided it was too risky and expensive to do an illustrated children’s book, especially when they hadn’t done one before, but I was quite interested in one of her reasons: The story was a bit short. People didn’t like to pay a lot for so few words.
In 1975 or 6 I attended a recruiting meeting for a company trying to get high school seniors and others to spend the summer tramping around selling Bibles and other books to women with wooden legs and glass eyes. One of the recruiter’s selling points was that their books had lots of words in them, unlike Rosie’s Walk, which was mostly pictures. Now which one would you want your children to read? Well, Rosie’s Walk shows a wonderful feel for Pennsylvania Dutch culture, while the other books somehow managed to get the original illustrators for Sally, Dick and Jane, so you can probably guess that I didn’t collect any glass eyes or wooden legs that summer.
Foreground
Of course, this is a review, not a personal essay, but, as Lionel Trilling said in his essay “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” our response to literature can be so intensely personal that talking about it can be a matter of bearing testimony. (Yes, a secular New York intellectual used the phrase “bearing personal testimony.” See my essay, “On the Importance of Bearing Personal Testimony” in the AML annual for 1994, I think.) Which is another way of saying that, often, our responses to a piece of writing reflect our experiences, so my experience trying to get my book published gave me an interest in seeing what kinds of books are being published. If I had known what book I was reviewing beforehand, I might not have offered to review Abish so I’m glad I didn’t. Deseret Software Library publishes a series of $40 cd-roms which include these books in the package. The package says, “Includes the popular book,” but I wonder if the cd-rom didn’t come first. I’ve assumed that the “My First Scripture Stories” series were book versions of the cd-roms, just like Disney publishes book versions of its cartoons. Seeing these books on the shelves, they reminded me of the cartooning style of some Saturday morning cartoons — which just don’t have the quality (the verbal quality or the detail or intricacy of movement) of classic Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner cartoons. But on looking closer, I like the books a lot better than I did just looking at them on the shelves.
Both books are paraphrases of the Book of Mormon. Ammon and the King tells of Ammon defending the king’s flocks at the waters of Sebus, being summoned into Lamoni’s presence, catching the king with guile (Alma 18:23), and watching the King fall to the earth as the veil of unbelief is cast from his mind. Ammon and the King ends the story there, simply noting that after Lamoni wakes up Ammon baptizes him. Abish continues the story, telling how the King, Queen, Ammon, and everyone but Abish fall to the earth, and showing how she summons the people and wakes them. It too ends with baptism.
I don’t fault Sherrie Johnson for ending the first story right in the middle of things, but I wonder why she cut out two of my favorite passages. When the Queen comes to Ammon, she doesn’t make that wonderfully touching comment: “others say that he is dead and that he stinketh, and that he ought to be placed in the sepulchre; but as for myself, to me he doth not stink” (Alma 19:5). When Lamoni awakes he says, “Blessed be the name of God.” and, “Behold, I have seen my redeemer. He shall redeem all mankind who believe on his name,” but in the Book of Mormon he says to his wife, “Blessed be the name of God, and blessed art thou. For as sure as he livest, behold, I have seen my Redeemer; and he shall come forth and be born of a woman, and he shall redeem all mankind who believe on his name” (Alma 19:12-13). By omitting the passages I’ve emphasized, Johnson omits something very tender about the marriage of Lamoni and his Queen. This is the only thing that mars the writing for me, and it’s a small thing. Johnson writes with admirable grace and economy, I just wish she had spent a few more words to tell us that a king blessed his queen, and why.
The Whole Picture
I’ve suggested that I have some aversion to the illustrations. As I’ve looked at them closer, I can tell both illustrators are talented artists, so my objections have more to do with sentimentality than with technique. These stories are about the life-changing joy, but some of the pictures don’t get past sentimentality. There is one of a horse, pig, duck, parrot and rodent perking up to hear the good news, that for some reason reminds me of Animal Farm. However, on the next page Mark McCune has a wonderful picture of a parrot(?) colored green, yellow, red, blue and black flying into the room where everyone lays. Also the picture of the thief being struck down as he tries to kill Ammon, has a good depiction of the surprise and agony on his face, and the picture of Abish praying has a fine sense of serenity and peace.
Tyler Lybbert’s illustrations for Ammon and the King are also very good (perhaps a bit more accomplished than McCune’s pictures). His use of perspective in one picture gives a marvelous visual equivalent of Lamoni being unable “for the space of an hour” to answer Ammon.
Both books use a device common to readers of Cricket, of having characters in the corners of the pages commenting on the action. In Ammon and the King 3 children, Havva, Leah and Helam herd sheep and tell where you can read the story in the Book of Mormon. In Abish they build a reed boat and help with pronunciation. My wife didn’t much care for that, but I didn’t mind it. There are some visual jokes that I quite like in each book, though. Lybbert shows the robbers as having their heads shaven except for a pony tail in the front. Where Johnson writes, “When the first man lifted his club, Ammon defended himself with his sword and cut off the man’s arm,” Lybbert shows him cutting off the pony tail, and shows the man deeply surprised. (I could quibble about this, but the picture looks appropriate.) McCune pays homage to Arnold Friberg. Look for the leopards, and look at the last two pictures of Lamoni, where he looks a bit like Charlton Heston in the scenes before Moses kills the overseer. (I wonder if McCune’s making Lamoni look a bit pharaonic is a sly reference to reformed Egyptian?)
Though there is much I could quibble with in these books, there is much I like in them, including the fact that Deseret Book didn’t try to impose consistency on the illustrators. Lybbert shows Lamoni’s throne room as a long hall with a dais and no windows (which is what makes the painting of Lamoni’s silence so effective), while McCune shows it as a small room with windows and no dais.
Does a Picture Paint a Thousand Words?
Before giving a sample of the prose, I should give a word count, since I mentioned it earlier: About 800 for each book. To answer the question my publisher implied, would I be willing to pay $4.95 and $5.95 for so few words, it depends on how much I had to spend. Right now I can’t afford either, and there are books that touch me on a deeper level than either of these, much as I like them. J. Frederic Voros Jr’s lyrical prose in The Stones of the Temple I find quite moving, along with Kathleen B. Peterson’s illustrations, and I find great beauty and charm in Phyllis Luch’s evocation of near eastern culture and art in the work that accompanies Lavina Fielding Anderson’s telling of Ruth, the Moabite Maiden. But I would ask a library to purchase both Ammon & the King and Abish. I wish both abundant readers.
And Finally, a Sample of the Prose
As the series title, “My First Scripture Stories” suggests, these are closer to paraphrase that to fiction, though they don’t try to paraphrase every incident or detail, and they make some expansions to the text. Compare the following passage and Alma 19:15-16. Notice how Johnson changes the scene slightly to emphasize Abish: She comes not only in her own sentence, but at the end of the paragraph and page. I wish Sherrie Johnson had found some way to similarly include and emphasize Lamoni’s blessing of his queen.
The servants of Lamoni were amazed. What was happening? Were the king and queen dead? Who was this strange Nephite? As they wondered, they remembered Ammon’s teachings. They began to cry unto God with all their might.Soon the servants were filled with the Spirit of the Lord. One by one they fell to the ground until only one woman was left. Her name was Abish.
Many years before, Abish had been converted unto the Lord because of a wonderful vision of her father.
Alma 19:15-16
15. Now, when the servants of the king had seen that they had fallen, they also began to cry unto God, for the fear of the Lord had come upon them also, for it was they who had stood before the king and testified unto him concerning the great power of Ammon.16. And it came to pass that they did call on the name of the Lord in their might, even until they had all fallen unto the earth, save it were one of the Lamanitish women, whose name was Abish, she having been converted unto the Lord for many years, on account of a remarkable vision of her father–
Harlow S. Clark