The sky is a deep, starry blue and the ground beneath it is painted solid black. Around a small fire, dozens of people in jeans, ribbon skirts and cowboy hats move in a loose spiral, some dancing, some watching from benches, a few children running between legs. The women carry rattles at their calves. The scent of burning cedar, the text says, drifts upward. This is the Great New Moon Ceremony, and in We Are Grateful by Traci Sorell it is where the year begins: not in January, but in the fall, when the Cherokee New Year is welcomed with clean houses, new clothes, a feast and the forgetting of old quarrels.
That opening tells a reader most of what this picture book believes. Celebration and repair come together. Community is crowded. And thanks, the book’s single subject, belongs to the whole calendar rather than one day of it.
A Year Told as One Sentence
Sorell writes We Are Grateful by Traci Sorell as four long sentences, one per season, each beginning with a line of weather and the same phrase of thanks, then unspooling through a chain of clauses that all start with an ellipsis. Read aloud, the effect is close to a litany. A child hears the pattern by the second season and starts anticipating it, which is exactly the habit the book hopes to build.
What fills those clauses is remarkably varied. Families gather buckbrush and honeysuckle for baskets. Elders tell stories over buttery bean bread and steaming hominy soup on a winter night. In spring a mother bends to pull wild onions, the season’s first food, to serve with hen’s eggs. A strawberry patch is planted, and the text notes that an ancestral story makes the fruit a reminder not to argue with each other. Nothing is ranked. A ceremony and a snowball fight earn the same line length.
Where We Are Grateful Lets Sorrow In
The quality that lifts the book above most gratitude titles for small children is its refusal to make thanks cheerful. In the fall section, between a basket-gathering scene and a grandmother announcing a baby’s Cherokee name, comes a line about remembering ancestors who suffered hardship and loss on the Trail of Tears. In winter, a family stands in a snowy cemetery beside the grave of an uncle who has died. And in spring, relatives embrace a clan member leaving home to serve in the military. We Are Grateful by Traci Sorell places each of these moments inside the same refrain of thanks, and the implication, never spelled out, is that gratitude includes the people who are gone and the people about to leave.
It is handled with great restraint. A single sentence carries the removal of the Cherokee from their homelands, and the back matter supplies the history: the 1830s removal split clans and families between present-day North Carolina and Oklahoma, and many died. Parents will judge for themselves how much to say. Children under five will likely pass over the line; older ones may stop and ask, which is the right outcome.
The Crowds Lessac Paints
Frané Lessac works in gouache with a flat, folk-art directness, and her best pages are the busiest. The ceremony spreads, the summer feast and the stickball field are packed with figures of every age and complexion, grandmothers with white hair beside toddlers in sneakers, and the sense of a modern nation gathered in one place is unmistakable. She alternates these full-bleed crowds with smaller framed vignettes for the intimate moments, a choice that slows the reader at the cemetery and on the sofa where a father sings a lullaby in Tsalagi to his baby.
The limits of the style show in those same small scenes. Lessac’s faces are simple and nearly identical in expression, so the emotional weight rests on the words. The summer section also asks a lot of the reader. The Green Corn Ceremony, the stickball pole and the Cherokee National Holiday arrive in quick succession, each with one line, and without the glossary at the back they register as names. We Are Grateful by Traci Sorell is at its best when an adult has read those notes first and can answer the questions that follow.
Why We Are Grateful Belongs on a November Table
We Are Grateful by Traci Sorell does not mention Thanksgiving, and that silence is useful. In a season when classroom crafts still default to paper Pilgrims, here is a Cherokee author showing a Cherokee family giving thanks in the present tense, all year. Sorell’s author’s note pushes the point further. Most books about her people, she writes, have stuck to legends and historical figures, and some have spread falsehoods, such as the myth of Cherokee princesses in a culture that never had royalty. She also describes the dual citizenship of tribal members, who belong both to their nation and to the United States. The final spread folds all four seasons into one painting, a snowy treehouse above a spring picnic, under the closing words: “Otsaliheliga. We are grateful.”
The Writer and the Painter
Traci Sorell is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and lives near Fort Gibson Lake in northeastern Oklahoma, where her mother’s family has been since the forced removal of 1838. She learned family history from her grandmother, whom she called elisi, the same word the book uses, and she is still learning the Cherokee language herself. We Are Grateful by Traci Sorell came first; later work includes At the Mountain’s Base and Classified, a picture-book life of the Cherokee aerospace engineer Mary Golda Ross. The book was named a 2019 Sibert Honor title by the American Library Association.
Lessac, born in New Jersey and now living in Western Australia, published her first picture book, My Little Island, in 1984; it was later featured on Reading Rainbow. Sorell’s acknowledgments thank her for travelling to the Cherokee Nation to study its people, plants and animals before painting, and credit Durbin Feeling, the nation’s language translator, with approving every Cherokee word.
After the Last Page
The reservations are modest. This is an inventory more than a story, and its ceremonies need a grown-up guide. But We Are Grateful by Traci Sorell does something few books for this age attempt: it lets loss and celebration share a page without strain, and it shows a living culture on its own terms.
For further reading, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry gives adults the same idea of gratitude as a practice of reciprocity, in essay form. Thank You, Omu! by Oge Mora offers younger children a story of sharing with a real plot, and Sorell’s own Powwow Day continues her portrait of Native family life today. Keep this one by the table this month and leave it there.