by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 26, 2010

It's a children's book about the Los Angeles riots. "It can happen when people get angry," a little boy's mother explains.  He narrates the chaos as he watches from his apartment building. ‘People are rioting in the street below… They look angry, but they look happy too,' I whisper

'After a while it's like a game', Mama says

Two boys carry a TV from an appliance store up the street. "Are they stealing it," the boy asks, and his mother nods. Someone breaks the window of a shoe store, and two women and a man climb past the broken glass. "I've never heard anybody laugh the way they laugh… I see the distant flicker of flames."

New details emerge about the neighborhood. The family never shops at Kim's market because "Mama says it's better if we buy from our own people. Mrs. Kim shouts at the rioters in Korean. The last store on the street to be robbed is a dry cleaners.

That night their apartment building is set on fire. "We rush down the stairs... The smoke makes me cough." Their neighbor rushes by, carrying his baby and howling young daughter. He warns then not to touch the stair's railing, because it's hot.

Eve Bunting was 66 when she wrote "Smoky Nights," but she'd already written over 100 other books for children. For this book she tapped illustrator David Diaz, who lived just an hour from the Los Angeles riots. He draws the people as abstract shapes, in watercolors over jangly collages (which earned him a Caldecott medal). Bunting dedicates the book to "the peacekeepers," and in her story firemen arrive to put out the flames.

The sidewalk sparkles with broken glass. Someone arrives to escort the families to a local shelter. "There are cots to sleep on and a table with hot drinks…  People keep coming. Some of them are crying." And the boy's cat is lost.

Bunting tucks a message in at the end of the story, since Mrs. Kim and the boy have both lost their cats. The cats always used to fight, but they arrive together in the arms of a fireman. The cats drink from the same milk dish, and the boy silences the crowd with an observation. "They probably didn't know each other before. Now they do."

"Perhaps when things settle down," his mother tells Mrs. Kim, "you and your cat will come over and share a dish of milk with us."

Learn more about this author, Moe Zilla.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.