Telling my grandmother that I was going to be a Horn Book intern was comparable to what it would have been like telling other ­relatives that I was going to be working for the New England Patriots. Yaya (known to all but her grandchildren as Natalie Coleman) has her own standards for determining the quality of children’s books, and a strong sign for her was an endorsement from The Horn Book Magazine, which she’d first encountered during a children’s literature class at Cal State–Los ­Angeles in the 1960s, when the magazine hadn’t even reached its semicentennial anniversary.

In the following two decades, when it came time to find new books for her own children, Yaya would turn to the library: first to borrow the latest Horn Book issues, then to check out the picture books whose reviews had caught her eye. She raised five devoted readers on established classics such as Corduroy and The Story of Ferdinand and everything created by Maurice Sendak, and on newer titles like Miss Nelson Is Missing! and The Aminal and everything illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman. The Colemans were such big fans of Hyman, in fact, that they sent her a birthday card one year. She’d been preoccupied completing the illustrations for Saint George and the Dragon at the time, but sent a thank-you note a few months later, writing, “You sure know how to make an illustrator feel appreciated, mystified (how did you know it was my birthday?), and happy.” Those devoted readers went on to have their own children in the twenty-first century, and The Horn Book continued to recommend Yaya books to satisfy her storytime-loving grandchildren’s demands.

Reading with Yaya. Photo courtesy of Emma Shacochis.

These are the books I can still hear her reading: making up new tunes for song lyrics, drawing out syllables for dramatic effect, using the high-pitched character voice before transitioning to the low, rumbling one. These are the books that she turned into an experience: surprising us with our very own Moon Pies after Jimmy Zangwow’s Out-of-This-World-Moon-Pie Adventure; acting out Caps for Sale with tiers of sunhats and helmets from the dress-up box; taking inspiration from Tracy Kane’s Fairy Houses to build our own using acorns, tree bark, moss, and anything else we could find in her garden. These are the books so beloved by my family that I can imagine another contribution alongside the author and illustrator’s names on the cover: First read to me by Natalie Coleman. I owe my entire family my gratitude for initiating and nurturing my love of reading, but Yaya is so synonymous with the existence of children’s literature in my mind that it’s as if she invented the very concept.

This is why, throughout my fall 2023 internship, I wanted to share every accomplishment and milestone with her immediately. After staffing the Horn Book’s Boston Book Festival booth in October 2023, I called her to describe all the aspects she would have loved: the kids who were still buzzing with excitement from having seen Rick Riordan’s keynote speech, the tote bags laden with crafts and giveaways from other tents, the answers I received from visitors about which books they would recommend if they wrote for The Horn Book (my favorite being a tween boy who flatly answered, “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” and promptly vanished into the crowd). Yaya and I had attended the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival together for seventeen years straight (beginning on my first birthday, when Yaya enlisted a warming-up mariachi band to play me, stroller-bound, “Las Mañanitas”), and every author’s signing line or costumed book character I spotted reminded me of our meticulously planned days on the National Mall.

I thought of Yaya again when my first brief review appeared in the Holiday High Notes section of the November/December 2023 issue, with my name set in small caps the way I’d learned to do when formatting incoming reviews. Yaya was an artist, and every painting of hers featured a small, elegant Natalie etched in a corner: none of her grandchildren’s messy coloring pages or lovingly scribbled drawings were complete, she always reminded us, until we’d added our “artist’s signature.” Since I, alas, did not inherit her talent for visual arts, this was the closest I’d had to an artist’s signature in my career.

After her issue arrived, I called to giddily suggest that she turn to the reviews on page thirteen. I watched her scan the page and notice my name: a pleased, sincere smile of recognition, followed by a teasing, “Oh, I know her!” Her played-up pride to make me laugh (“I’ll have to frame this now”) gave way to sincere praise for my accomplishment before she’d even read a word.

As Yaya fetched her set of neon Post-it flags to mark the paragraph, I knew that she would forget our phone call soon. She wouldn’t remember until the next time she went for her new issue, noticed the brightly colored tab, and opened to that page. She wouldn’t remember what I had told her, but she would know my name when she saw it on the page. Memory has become a problem for her in recent years, the kind of problem where written instructions and sticky-note reminders are necessary for everyday tasks, where she’ll ask the same questions and tell the same stories within a single conversation. She still reads picture books that my mother borrows from the library, but any book longer than approximately thirty-two pages has become harder to follow.

Which grandchild is "Yaya's favorite"? Photo courtesy of Emma Shacochis.

The summer before my internship, I read Pedro Martín’s Mexikid, a middle-grade graphic memoir that reminded me vividly of stories from my mother’s childhood, my own experiences with the eight other Coleman grandkids, and the children’s books created by or centered on Latinos that Yaya used to read us. She had encountered few Latino characters in literature growing up (with the exception of Angelo the Naughty One), so she monitored The Horn Book for Hispanic-sounding surnames or titles and filled her bookshelves with Gary Soto’s witty stories of food and community (Chato’s Kitchen and Too Many Tamales), Tomie dePaola’s vibrant folktales (The Lady of Guadalupe and Adelita), and clever retellings of fairy tales (like Los Tres Cerdos: Nacho, Tito, and Miguel by Bobbi ­Salinas and Red Ridin’ in the Hood and Other Cuentos by Patricia Santos Marcantonio). Yaya would adore Mexikid — its cartoonlike illustrations, its sense of humor, and its Mexican American perspective — and I wished I could share it with her the way she’d shared countless books with me.

About halfway through my internship, I was helping write blurbs for the books on the Horn Book’s 2023 Fanfare list — Mexikid among them. A roughly sixty-word paragraph is far from equivalent to an entire graphic memoir, of course, but it could still highlight the book’s premise and strengths, could be marked with a Post-it arrow with my name written beside it, could be found in Yaya’s favorite magazine whenever she picked it up to re-read, could even end up catching the eye of some other Horn Book reader looking for recommendations for their family — the kind of full-circle moment that any book lover could appreciate. I’m one of those book lovers; for that, I have my grandmother and The Horn Book to thank.

From the November/December 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. For more Horn Book centennial coverage, click here.

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