One of the cardinal sins of book reviewing is evaluating a book for what it is not. Perhaps it is not the book the reviewer would like to be reading, or is not about a subject the reviewer finds of value or interest, or does not take an approach to its subject that the reviewer would prefer. I had to think hard about these caveats when I was editing the review, forthcoming in the January Horn Book Magazine, of The Circus Comes to the Village by Yutaka Kobayashi. Originally published in Japan in 1996, the book is set in wartime Afghanistan and is about a circus come to town, and a boy, young flutist Mirado, who realizes an archetypical child’s dream: “The circus people loved my music. My grandma says I can go with the circus!”

It’s a gorgeous book, a series of double-spread paintings that show the beauty of the landscape and the fun of the circus in tidy, child-pleasing detail. The plot is fairly incidental, but the wish-fulfilling conclusion, however unlikely, will probably make many young readers and listeners happy. But I couldn’t stop thinking of bacha bazi, an old and now ostensibly illegal Afghani custom of boys lured or purchased or kidnapped from their homes to serve as entertainers and sexual partners for adult men (see this fascinating documentary). I worried for Mirado and was not encouraged when his friend Yamo says to his father “Mirado is so lucky. He is going to have fun every day. Right, Dad?” To which “Yamo’s father just smiles.” Yikes. Viewed in this way, Mirado’s sudden departure with the circus seems rather more plausible.

But that is all me. We don’t know what fate Mirado will meet. That’s not what the book is about. While nothing in the story excludes the possibility of such a fate, neither is that possibility inherent. But we can’t review what a book is not about. In the case of this book, I cannot take it to task for soft-pedaling the story as it lives in my head. Nor can I insist that the story the book does tell is the wrong one, that the real story lies elsewhere, in another book or a book not yet written. "One book at a time," Edna Vanek told Betsy Hearne, who in turn told me.