Get wormy, be happy
Two worms, both named Worm, decide they want to get married in Worm Loves Worm by J. J. Austrian ( Harper-Collins, 32 pp, $ 22, ages 4 to 8 with illustrations by Mike Curato). They announce their intentions to their friends, and soon plans for a wedding are set in motion. Beetle volunteers to act as their Best Beetle; Cricket wants to be the one to marry them. All the details are soon sorted out, except for one: the worms can’t figure out who should be the bride and who should be the groom. Realizing that it doesn’t really matter, they decide they can both be both. And so they wed, with one worm wearing a suit and veil, the other in a dress and top hat.
Some might argue that a political agenda has no place in a kids’ book, but that’s precisely the point of Austrian’s delightfully simple and funny story; the worms aren’t making a statement because there’s no worm-marriage precedent against which to rebel. Gender isn’t a construct, it simply doesn’t exist for them. The Love That Split the World by Emily Henry (Razorbill, 400pp, $24, ages 14 and up) is perhaps as dramatic and epic as its title suggests, so much so that the highschool romance at the centre of the story can’t even be contained in one universe.
Since she was a child, Natalie has been visited at night by a figure that she’s come to refer as Grandmother. For years, Grandmother spends her visits telling stories that connect Natalie to a past she barely knew, but in Nat- alie’s final summer before college, Grandmother simply passes along a cryptic warning, telling her, “You have three months to save him.” It’s around this time that Natalie meets the handsome ( of course) and misunderstood ( of course) Beau, a young man who seems to occupy a parallel version of her small Kentucky hometown.
Strip away the convoluted plot elements, and Natalie and Beau’s story is nothing special: two beautiful teenagers fall into a quick and sugary infatuation with one another. Yet Henry has created in Natalie a savvy and driven heroine, who has learned to explore the ambiguities of her life through the stories she is told. The book is a love story, sure, but more than that it is a loving tribute to making sense of the world through creating shared narratives.