It began with a young child’s question: “What was Grandma Annie like?”
From that question, asked by her daughter Suhaila, author Maya Soetoro-Ng — sister of President Barack Obama — has crafted an extraordinary picture book titled “Ladder to the Moon” ($16.99, for ages 4 up).
Luminously illustrated by Yuri Morales, the book tells of a young girl’s nighttime dream journey to the moon with her grandmother. While there, they look down on a world filled with heartbreak and issue an invitation for those in trouble to join them in a circle of compassion on the glowing surface of the moon.
When it’s time for the young girl — also named Suhaila — to head back to bed, she brings back vivid memories of the lasting worldwide “net of love” woven by her grandmother.
While Soetoro-Ng uses the picture-book format to tell her story, “Ladder to the Moon” isn’t a typical picture book. Yes, it can be read on one level to preschoolers as just a reassuring dreamlike tale, filled with magic and moonlight.
But it’s also a book with deeper layers that can spark conversations with older readers. In “Ladder to the Moon,” Soetoro-Ng tackles difficult life issues with a gentle intensity, showing how compassion and community can bring us together even in the face of overwhelming catastrophes.
“I hope it will open up conversations about our inheritance and our responsibility to the rest of the world,” Soetoro-Ng said in a recent interview during a book tour in Washington, D.C.
“It’s about war and peace, death and dying, and those who came before us. Hopefully, sharing this book with children will be a layered experience.
“My feeling is that we need to talk with our children about these things, and we also need to listen to our children.”
Soetoro-Ng, 40, shares a mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, with Obama. Soetoro-Ng remembers that her mother would get them up early to tell them stories in the moonlight.
“The moon is the same everywhere,” said Soetoro-Ng, who also recalls her mother giving her a postcard of a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe that was titled “Ladder to the Moon. “I loved it, and taped it on my wall.”
Both the O’Keeffe postcard and her mother’s moonlight stories helped inspire the text of her picture book, Soetoro-Ng said. Perhaps the biggest inspiration of all, however, came in 2004, with the birth of her daughter Suhaila, whose name means “glow around the moon” in Sanskrit.
Soetoro-Ng was deeply saddened by the idea that her mother, who died of cancer in 1995, would never meet her granddaughter, and began searching for ways to connect them.
When Suhaila one day asked what her grandmother was like, Soetoro-Ng began thinking of a story that could answer that question in a way that would honor her mother, a woman of great compassion who loved exploring cultures and telling stories.
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