The Button Box

  • Interest Level: Grade 3 - Grade 7
  • Reading Level: Grade 4

After Jewish fifth-grader Ava and her Muslim best friend Nadeem are called hateful names at school, Ava’s Granny Buena rummages in her closet and pulls out a glittering crystal button box. It’s packed with buttons that generations of Ava’s Sephardic ancestors have cherished. With the help of Granny’s mysterious cat Sheba, Ava and Nadeem discover that a button from the button box will take them back in time. Suddenly, they are in ancient Morocco, where Nadeem’s ancestor, Prince Abdur Rahman, is running for his life. Can Ava and Nadeem help the prince escape to Spain and fulfill his destiny, creating a legendary Golden Age for Muslims, Jews and Christians?

Format Your Price Add
978-1-7284-2397-5
$7.99
978-1-7284-5210-4
$22.99
Interest Level Grade 3 - Grade 7
Reading Level Grade 4
Copyright 2022
Publisher Lerner Publishing Group
Imprint Kar-Ben Publishing ®
Language English
Number of Pages 152
Publication Date 2022-04-01
Text Type Fiction—Historical
BISACS JUV064000, JUV039280, JUV039060
Dewey [Fic]
Dimensions 5.25 x 7.5
Lexile 770
Features Author/Illustrator note, Glossary, Reviewed, Starred Reviews, Teaching Guides, and eSource

Author: Bridget Hodder

Bridget Hodder began her career as an Aztec archaeologist, translating ancient stories. Then she realized she had her own tales to tell. She is Sephardic, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, UCLA and Vanderbilt University.

Author: Fawzia Gilani-Williams

Fawzia Gilani was born and raised in England where she became a teacher. She is the author of many children's books and an international educational consultant with a PhD in children's literature and character development. She is a Global Representative for the International Positive Education Network and works for the Abu Dhabi Education Council. She spends her time in the United Arab Emirates, Ohio, and England with her daughter and husband.

Illustrator: Harshad Marathe

Harshad Marathe is an illustrator and storyteller. He has an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and has illustrated many books. He has backpacked all over the world. He lives in India.

Lerner eSource™ offers free digital teaching and learning resources, including Common Core State Standards (CCSS) teaching guides. These guides, created by classroom teachers, offer short lessons and writing exercises that give students specific instruction and practice using Common Core skills and strategies. Lerner eSource also provides additional resources including online activities, downloadable/printable graphic organizers, and additional educational materials that would also support Common Core instruction. Download, share, pin, print, and save as many of these free resources as you like!

The Button Box

After Jewish fifth-grader Ava and her Muslim best friend Nadeem are called hateful names at school, Ava’s Granny Buena rummages in her closet and pulls out a glittering crystal button box. It’s packed with buttons that generations of Ava’s Sephardic ancestors have… View available downloads →

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Behind The Button Box: A Time-Travelling, Cross-Cultural Adventure

The Button Box is a new middle-grade novel about cousins, one Jewish and one Muslim, who travel back in time to ancient Morocco. Below, co-authors Bridget Hodder and Fawzia Gilani-Williams discuss their hopes for the book, what inspired them, and more. Where did you get the inspiration… View →

Reviews

Lilith Magazine

Ava, a Sephardic Jewish girl, and Nadeem, her Muslim cousin, are best friends. After Ava and Nadeem are bullied at school, a mysterious button helps them travel back in time to medieval Morocco where they learn more about their roots and begin to take pride in their unique identities; their amazing adventures are recounted in The Button Box (Lerner/Kar-Ben, $17.99) co-written by a Sephardic Jewish and a Muslim author and based on real historical events surrounding the convivencia period in medieval Spain–at time when Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together without persecution. Fiction editor Yona Zeldis McDonough talks to Bridget Hodder about what she sees as the essential message of this magical tale.

YZM: Where did the inspiration for The Button Box come from?

BH: I grew up utterly under the spell of my sophisticated, slightly mysterious Sephardic Grandmamá. As a Sephardic Jew, I could never feel fully Jewish amongst my Ashkenazic friends, whose customs I did not understand. But Grandmamá was so firmly herself, and so clearly fabulous, that I could feel good about the culture she passed on to my mother and to me.

Everything about her was fascinating–from her untraceable accent, to her sparkling jewelry, to her oblique Ladino sayings and plaintive Spanish songs about abducted Jewish girls and Muslim princes. Grandmamá is the inspiration for Granny Buena in The Button Box; a woman who pulls out a chest full of magical, glittering buttons, each of which will transport her Muslim and Jewish grandchildren back to the time and place of the ancestor who wore it.

“The Button Box” is a metaphor for the handing down of Sephardic women’s wisdom from generation to generation. A wisdom almost subversive in its connection to positive ancestral female power, in a direct line back to “Meryam la profeta,” who, according to folklore, holds not only a tambourine but a set of mystical keys that can set a seal upon prayer. The Sephardic lifeways my own Grandmamá embodied are in danger of dying out with her generation–and in The Button Box, I have a chance to pass on some of what she gave me to readers around the world.

For years, I had shied away from writing what I thought of as “The Sephardic Book,” which eventually became The Button Box. Agents had told me it was “too niche”– no one wanted to hear about an obscure minority within the Jewish minority, who didn’t even eat bagels and lox or have bubbies, and who spoke strange, varied forms of Spanish. But with the rise over the past several years of foul-mouthed and foul-hearted new political factions that proudly promote hatred against Jews and Muslims in the U.S., I knew the time for “The Sephardic Book” had finally come. And I knew I would need a Muslim co-author to bring her genuine lived experience to the story. Because no tale of ancient Sephardic history can be accurately told without including Muslim history as well.

My friend and co-author, Fawzia Gilani-Williams, was inspired by her own family’s experiences of increasing anti-Muslim hatred in the world, and the situations she has seen as an educator in the U.S., U.K. and U.A.E. Her father’s family fled Partition in India with nothing but the clothes on their backs. She, too, is alarmed at the shocking turn politics and people have taken in recent years, pushing back on progress we have made. The interfaith love of The Button Box, paired with its time-travel foray into a historical Golden Age where Jews, Muslims, and Christians co-existed in peace, was a perfect opportunity to cultivate allyship and courage in the face of these challenges.

YZM: How did the writing partnership between you and Fawzia come about?

BH: We were introduced by Joni Sussman, publisher of the Jewish imprint at Lerner Books–Kar-Ben—who later bought The Button Box. Joni had already worked with Fawzia Gilani-Williams while editing Fawzia’s beautiful interfaith picture book classic, Yaffa and Fatima: Shalom, Salaam.

Fawzia and I clicked instantly…and the rest is history! (Muslim and Jewish time-travel history, to be exact.) We worked very hard for years to infuse the book with “Celebration Representation”—my term for raising the bar from toleration of diverse identities, to celebration of them.

Fawzia works in the U.A.E. and I’m in Boston, so the process wasn’t easy. Yet we partnered via Zoom, Google Docs and email to create characters who were true to their own religions and cultures, while still managing to be true to each other.

YZM: How are Sephardic Judaism and Islam represented in the book, and how are their ancient histories intertwined?

BH: Sephardic Jews and Muslims in the book are represented as inextricably culturally intertwined…because we are. At the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, His Excellency Dr. Ali Rashid Al’Nuaimi of the UAE recently spoke of his deep longing to see a return of the Golden Age of Sefarad for Jews and Muslims, and how his country is working to make that a reality within their boundaries and throughout the Middle East. So make no mistake–what happened in the past is still very real to us today, and can be a beacon of hope for peace.

As for ancient history, Jewish and Muslim cultures probably began giving rise to a Sephardic identity around 1500 years ago. But the synergy didn’t truly take off until 755 CE, when Abdur Rahman I, the historical Muslim prince who appears in The Button Box, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco to Hispania and founded a beautiful Muslim caliphate there.

Courageous, innovative Jews had already ventured into Hispania long before, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. And when word of Abdur Rahman’s religious tolerance spread, more Jews came. This positive Jewish and Muslim interaction, which included Christians as well, gave rise to a Golden Age in Iberia–a fabled time of huge leaps forward in sciences, literature and the arts. My own ancestors in Toledo were part of it.

YZM: Why is it so difficult to find mainstream children’s books in U.S. public schools that accurately mirror these cultures and belief systems?

BH: Books with characters who depart from the white nondenominational Christian status quo have long been excluded from public schools, as a potential source of controversy. Even now, they are filed away in the “Religion” section in libraries and bookstores instead of among their YA and Middle Grade literary peers.

This largely unconscious default mode renders Jewish or Muslim characters uncomfortably conspicuous for teachers who worry about the appropriateness of “religion in the classroom.” Once students notice these characters, they might start asking questions about them that educators don’t feel equipped or empowered to answer. And the educators themselves may then be attacked by intentionally disruptive parent challenges.

The Button Box isn’t a proselytizing tool; it’s an adventure story with Jewish and Muslim kids doing a few ordinary Jewish and Muslim things, while they travel through time learning how to own and defend their cultural identities. Yet public school librarians have already approached me to ask, “Is it safe for me to give your book to our students?”

That word “safe” should shock us in the context of buying diverse books. Our educators don’t just feel threatened right now, they are threatened, simply for trying to stock books that accurately reflect the complexity of the free world outside their school walls.

YZM: What is the convivencia? Can you describe the ways Jews and Muslims co-existed in medieval times? When did this change?

BH: Convivencia in its simplest form means “co-existence” in Spanish. But it also refers to the incredibly productive harmony of Jews, Muslims and Christians in Iberia during the Golden Age of Sefarad, from the early 8th century to the late 15th.

During the convivencia, Jews became knights, and jousted in tournaments. We were surgeons, engineers, poets, herbalists, singers, merchants and generals. We were cool. (Which of course we still are, but…jousting!) When my Grandmamá used to sing archaic Spanish songs about ladies in castles and the lords who vied for their favor, I always knew those were our ladies and our lords…and somehow, it made a difference.

The Button Box explores the exact moment when the stage was set for the Golden Age to take place. We hope to transport readers to further exciting chapters of the convivencia in the next books in the Button Box series.

YZM: What do you see as the takeaway here? What kinds of conversations do you hope the book will spark?

BH: We want readers to enjoy the book so much that they don’t realize they’ve come to love and understand Muslim and Jewish characters who may be very different from themselves–or who, conversely, may joyfully reflect their own experience.

We included maps, a Ladino/Arabic/Hebrew glossary, reading resources and thorough historical notes at the back of our book to support further discussion and study. We are consciously empowering kids and adults who feel unequipped to answer even the most basic questions like “Who are Jews?” and “Who are Muslims?” and touching on some of the issues you brought up in this interview.

In addition, The Button Box belongs in public schools, to provide an accurate, light-filled counter-balance to the dark Holocaust narratives which are often public school kids’ only exposure to Jewishness.

YZM: What’s next for you and Fawzia?

BH: We’re thrilled to have a picture book, “The Promise,” coming out with Kar Ben in 2023! The action takes place in WWII Morocco, with Sephardic and Muslim protagonists, though it is not a Holocaust tale. Based on a true story of love, loss and friendship regained, we can’t wait to share it with the world.

Karuna Riazi

“A profoundly inspiring look at interfaith love and courage that will thrill and move readers. Timely and timeless.”—Karuna Riazi, author of the Gauntlet series

Laura Shovan

“This exciting cross-cultural story will have young readers at the edge of their seats, clamoring for more Button Box escapades. A perfect choice for fans of The Magic Treehouse series who are transitioning to middle-grade novels.”—Laura Shovan, coauthor of Sydney Taylor Notable Book A Place at the Table

Jewish Book Council

This live­ly mid­dle grade adven­ture has two young pro­tag­o­nists, cousins Ava and Nadeem. Ava is Jew­ish while Nadeem is Mus­lim, and a school bul­ly tor­ments them due to their reli­gious back­grounds. They tell their grand­moth­er, a con­sum­mate sto­ry-teller and very wise woman. She begins to tell them an ancient tale, but is inter­rupt­ed and the tale remains unfinished.

Granny Bue­na has a box of inter­est­ing old but­tons, some antique, one of which has the mag­i­cal prop­er­ty of trans­port­ing the chil­dren back in time. They find them­selves in ancient Moroc­co, becom­ing acquaint­ed with his­tor­i­cal fig­ures, as well as some of their own ances­tors. The authors con­struct a world filled with col­or and tex­ture that will spark the inter­ests of young read­ers of today. The sights, the scents, and the atmos­pheres of ancient bazaars and homes cre­ate an indeli­ble impres­sion with char­ac­ters clad in robes, scarves, and turbans.

One of the char­ac­ters, Abdul Rah­man, is a Mus­lim prince who is flee­ing boun­ty hunters and is in need of the chil­dren’s help to escape to safe­ty in Spain. They are hes­i­tant because they know that if they are caught, the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty will suf­fer the con­se­quences. Along with a brave, resource­ful cousin, they gath­er their courage and help facil­i­tate a dar­ing escape that indi­rect­ly, but clear­ly, paves the way for a gold­en age of peace and pros­per­i­ty for the Jews of Spain.

Upon reen­try to mod­ern times, Ava and Nadeem real­ize that they have learned not only a slice of his­to­ry but also about their own abil­i­ties to han­dle bul­lies as well as the impor­tance of a well-told tale.

A glos­sary of terms is append­ed, as well as an authors’ note dis­cussing the top­ics addressed in the book such as Sephardic Jew­ry, some parts of Span­ish his­to­ry, and the over­lap between folk­lore and his­tor­i­cal events.

The But­ton Box is the first in a pro­ject­ed series about time trav­el and history.

Kirkus Reviews

“Both the modern and medieval characters are presented in emotionally charged language as unique individuals with strong personalities.” —Kirkus Reviews STARRED