By Francesca Sanna
A mother and her two children flee a war that has already taken their father, told in a picture book whose soft shape hides how frightening the road out really is.
A girl, her little brother, and their mother once lived a happy life by the sea. Then the war came, and it took their father. With him gone, the mother decides the three of them have to leave, so they pack what they can carry and run. What follows is the escape itself: hiding in a dark forest, climbing over a border wall past a guard who towers over them like a giant, riding in the backs of trucks, and finally crossing a black sea in a small boat at night. The mother keeps telling the children not to be afraid. Francesca Sanna built the story out of real refugees she met and interviewed, and she both wrote and painted it.
It looks like a soft book and it is not one, and that gap is the whole reason to know it well before you open it. Sanna tells a refugee escape almost entirely through her paintings, so a child too young for a novel about war can still feel it: the darkness that keeps swallowing the family, the border guard drawn enormous, the sea that could tip the boat. For a child who has half-heard something frightening on the news, this hands them one family to hold onto and a mother who keeps going. For a child who has lived something like it, the pictures say the fear was real and the leaving was brave. Read it with them on your lap, not across the room.