The first is the 17th-century The Great Picture, produced for Lady Anne Clifford and now at Abbot Hall in Kendal. Clifford spent much of her adult life in legal battles for her Yorkshire inheritance. Her tenacity finally paid off and she celebrated her triumph by commissioning an extraordinary life-sized painting of herself, her parents and her siblings from an artist thought to be Jan van Belcamp. The school was Mennonite, and conservative. There was no dancing. The Mennonite parents didn’t drink. But there was never censorship. The library had an aspect of calm, an expanse that opened itself up to Tania every time she entered. She saw books in English and Spanish and shelves of novels. “This is what the world is like,” she remembered thinking. She says that while she cannot be certain who the Babushka Lady is: “I am certain that the Babushka [Lady] is an under-researched character, that she was completely overlooked. If that happened today there would be a manhunt for her and you would expect to see the footage.”

I was worried enough that the Babushka Lady could be Jerrie that I confronted Jerrie,” she says. “It took me a while to be able to work up to the conversation with Jerrie and her answers to that conversation were not particularly reassuring to me.”

Other 'guilty' patrons sent in their overdue books after hearing about the return

To celebrate Joe Biden’s 81st birthday, Donald Trump released an alleged physical showing him to be healthy and in shape. “We all know Donald Trump is the picture of health. Specifically, the before picture,” Stephen Colbert joked on The Late Show. Her answers were bizarre, off the rails,” she says. “She seemed first of all thrilled that I had found June Cobb. I expected her to walk out in a huff that I was looking into this or I had come up with a wild theory. Or follow me down the rabbit hole here … they were just white buses,” Colbert laughed. “There’s this thing called Occam’s razor, which is what I use to cut my ears off when Clay Higgins speaks.” That was before the school board meeting on April 5, 2022, when Tania watched parents read aloud from books they described as a danger to kids. It was before she received a phone call from the district, the day after that, instructing her to remove four books from her shelves. It was before a member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty told her on Facebook, a few days later, that she shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near students. It had been 18 months since then. Nine months since she had taken Florida’s new training for librarians, a mandatory hour-long video, and heard the state say that books in the library must not contain sexual content that could be “harmful to minors” and that violating this statute would result in a third-degree felony. “A crime,” the training had said. “Districts should err on the side of caution.” It had been seven months since she began collecting Florida’s laws and statutes in a purple folder on her desk, highlighting the sections that made her mad, and also the ones that could get her fired. Six months since she broke out in hives, since eczema crept up the side of her face, since she started having trouble sleeping and got a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication. Five months since she stood in her house crying and her husband said it wasn’t worth it anymore. He could work two jobs if he had to. “You need to quit,” he’d told her. Six weeks since the start of another school year. Five weeks since she had given her notice.

It wasn’t just Tania doing this. It was more than 1,400 librarians in all of Florida’s 67 counties, each district interpreting the law in its own way. In the panhandle, Escambia County had instructed its schools to close parts of their libraries entirely until every book on every shelf had been reviewed for sexual content. In Charlotte County, near Fort Myers, schools were told to remove any books with LGBTQ characters from elementary and middle school libraries. She decided to look at photographs to see if she could spot Jerrie in Dallas, and came across the “anomaly” of the Babushka Lady. A number of people fell down the JFK assassination rabbit hole never to return,” she writes, “and I wasn’t in a hurry to become one of them.” Sacco’s illustrated reportorial deep-dive felt like a breakthrough not just for journalism but also for the graphic novel — proving that what we once called comics can be a conduit for the darkest and most serious material. Nathan Thrall, author of the recent book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” calls it “a powerful and brilliant work of reportage that uncovers, in the form of a graphic novel, an Israeli massacre in Gaza in 1956, at the same time depicting in Sacco’s inimitable style the present-day lives of the people of Rafah and Khan Younis.” Look her up on Wikipedia and you will find a lengthy entry about her extraordinary life as a pioneer, adventurer and champion of women’s rights.Guys, get up. Walk around,” Lorente said. “Look at books. It’s not a chitchat session. You need to be up and actively looking at books.” Tania had planned to spend the rest of her career in the Osceola County School District. She was 51. She could have stayed for years at Tohopekaliga, a school she loved that had only just opened in 2018. The library was clean and new. The shelves were organized. The chairs had wheels that moved soundlessly across the carpet. The floor plan was open, designed by architects who had promised “the 21st century media center.” Tania asks students to hold up their wristbands granting them access to a homecoming pep rally. Students at the Tohopekaliga pep rally in late September.