BOOK WATCH : Smoky Night

‘There, there,” a mother consoles a weeping, terrified child as bullets fly and fire rages. “It’s all right. It’s gonna be all right.”

Is she lying to the child? How “all right” is it really going to be? How does she know?

She’s not lying. Moments like these, as sociologist Peter Berger wrote years ago in a thoughtful little book entitled “Rumor of Angels,” express a kind of non-religious or pre-religious faith, a trust that somehow the world is not, finally, hostile to the human being.

But not every adult can say “there, there” when a child most needs to hear such words. During the 1992 riots, as so much of Los Angeles went up in flames, words of reassurance caught in the throat. For parents, teachers and others with children in their charge, the indispensable minimum of trust seemed in peril.

Fortunately, trust has an ally in children’s book author Eve Bunting and illustrator David Diaz. Last week, their children’s book “Smoky Night” won the prestigious Caldecott Medal of the American Library Assn. Trust, basic trust, is the moral of Bunting’s story of two cats lost in the riots and the families that go looking for them. Diaz, whose acrylic paintings of riot scenes evoke the work of the great Georges Rouault, found a way to portray the dignity of people struggling to trust even as they flee from danger and fight with their own rage.

The world has begun to forget the 1992 L.A. riots, but Angelenos still bear the wounds. Bunting and Diaz deserve honor not just as artists but also as healers.