“It’s not all mulch and sunshine out there.”
“A perfect little book,” is what Amy Bloom ’75, Wesleyan’s writer-in-residence, calls her NYTimes-featured first children’s book, Little Sweet Potato:
“I realize you’re not supposed to say that about your own book. But I love it sort of unabashedly,” Ms. Bloom said of the 29-page tale, which follows the trials of a “lumpy, dumpy, bumpy” young tuber who is accidentally expelled from his garden patch and must find a new home. On his journey, he is castigated first by a bunch of xenophobic carrots, then by a menacing gang of vain eggplants (Little Sweet Potato “didn’t know the world had such scary vegetation in it,” writes Ms. Bloom). By book’s end, the intrepid, tenderhearted potato is accepted into the “Hodge-Podge Patch,” where inhabitants welcome vegetables and flowers of all kinds.
“There was one possible ending where he finds another sweet potato patch, but that seemed to suggest one could only be happy with one’s own kind. And it wasn’t a sweet potato apartheid I wanted to write,” Ms. Bloom cracked.
Smart and charming, with an accurate prediction of Zonker Harris Day visions, Little Sweet Potato will be released on August 21. Pre-order it here.