“When we come together in groups, we make amazing things. Our admission ticket into these groups is not our thoughts or feelings. Our faces are our tickets. Our faces let us look out and know others and let them know us.” So begins Robert Hoge’s Ugly: A Memoir, which our selection committee chose as WORLD’s Children’s Nonfiction Book of the Year.

In Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Secret Keepers, Reuben Pedley, 11, lives with his widowed mother in a modest apartment in the Lower Downs of New Umbra. He spends his summer break exploring the abandoned buildings in his depressed neighborhood. On one of these expeditions he discovers a leather pouch containing an antique watch and winding key. Reuben guesses it’s valuable, but not until his meeting with elderly watchmaker Mrs. Genevieve does he suspect it may have supernatural powers.

In seventh grade, my teacher Mrs. Beard called on an unprepared student. “Oh my gosh!” the girl said. That exclamation brought the lesson to a halt. My gosh, Mrs. Beard explained, was a euphemism for another expression she did not say, but wrote on the board: My God! Now, what does the Third Commandment say? (Most of us knew what she was talking about, even if we didn’t have the commandments in numerical order.) What’s the implication? (That we shouldn’t use God’s name in vain or even substitute for it.) Lesson concluded; now back to Texas history.

Stephen Decatur, one of our first national heroes, distinguished himself during the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812, became captain of the USS Constitution at the age of 25, and proposed a famous toast. The toast may be better known than the man: At a dinner in Washington, D.C., Decatur reportedly raised a glass and said, “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!”

Did you recognize when it happened? When politicians began over-promising, even saying things they knew weren’t true? When the party in power began strictly controlling the information it put out? When presidential spokesmen started spouting obvious falsehoods with a straight face?

But wait—hasn’t that been happening for a while now? I remember a certain president making a bare-faced denial about a young female intern while shaking a finger at the camera. Another president smoothly promised that his sweeping healthcare program would not disrupt anyone’s current insurance plan.

Anyone who sails the high seas of political dialogue on the internet encounters a lot of this kind of thing: “Dear White, Christian Trump Supporter—We Need to Talk.” That’s the title of a much-shared article on The Huffington Post, written by a female social-sciences professor at a West Coast university. But the combined condescension and anguish of the piece are echoing from every progressive corner: What’s wrong with you Christian conservatives?

A few days after the inauguration, a friend posted on Facebook, “Anybody else glad it’s over?” Meaning a tumultuous election, nights of protest, and a massive nationwide march led by women in pink headgear. I had to respond, “It’s not over.”