Simone

PreS-Gr 4–Colored pencil, graphite, and watercolors in digital illustrations provide soft sweeps across the page, showing events as if misty through memory, and rendering up a sad story in a way that is resonant for young readers. These events take place in panels (prettiest comic-book style ever) that depict a nesting of stories. First, the young narrator is dreaming in color before black-and-white scenes show her evacuation from a safe home threatened by forest fires and then a journey to a large room where other families are gathered. Her mother tells of her own loved one, facing floods in Vietnam. The narrator becomes part of a group of children drawing, and goes from feeling helpless to hopeful that she and other children will take matters such as climate change into their own hands. The quiet strength of the narrative is that it stretches a sense of urgency across generations but never becomes overwhelming. The pictures carry this same sense of calm. With wildfires, like hurricanes, now part of the sort-of-ordinary catastrophes of modern life, the book offers calm, reasoning, and memory as scaffolding for a child’s determination regarding her future.