The Journey

In a piercing first-person account, one of the two children in the family pictured here tells the story of losing their father to war and undertaking a harrowing journey with their mother as they hide in cargo trucks, evade guards, scale walls, and endure a sea passage on an overcrowded ferry. Sanna's stylized illustrations, with gargantuan villains and swirling inky black, are both captivating and unsettling. Specifics of the setting are never established. Details in the illustrations, such as headscarves and minarets, suggest an Islamic-world origin, while mountains and forest fauna (including a reindeer in a harness) a Nordic destination. That intentional lack of specificity adds disquiet to the journey, and Sanna amplifies the tension with occasional dissonance between the text and art; at one point we hear the narrator say, "But mother is with us and she is never scared," while the accompanying image shows her distraught and weeping. Still, the story is not without hope. The family's arrival is accompanied by an uplifting ascendance of birds and the promise of a new beginning. An author's note characterizes the arc as a "collage of personal stories" the author collected in a refugee center in Italy, inviting connections to the current state of the real world. thom barthelmess