A Star Shines Through
by Anna Desnitskaya; illus. by the author
Primary, Intermediate    Eerdmans    40 pp.
8/24    9780802856319    $18.99
e-book ed.  9781467468381    $18.99

Fleeing war, a mother and child leave their country, city, and cheerful apartment with a star-shaped cardboard lamp in its window. In the new country everything is different: apartment, language, food, view, even the mother and the narrator. “It’s not like home here,” the child says, looking at the characterless, bleak apartment and the streets with their incomprehensible signs. But then the two create a new star lamp just like the one in their old home, “and after that, everything around us became a little less different.” In verbal and visual counterpoint, Desnitskaya illuminates the storyteller’s spare, potent remarks. For example, on the left of one spread is the old, comfy window seat and view, suffused with the star lamp’s golden light; on the right is the new place, stark under a bare lightbulb. (One old-life illustration shows a second adult, now missing.) The quality of light—golden warmth versus blue-screen coldness—makes visible the sense of alienation and displacement and, in turn, the child’s growing familiarity with their new home. Desnitskaya offers no quick, false transformation, but rather an adaptation, an adjustment. That one familiar thing, the star lamp, can’t bring home back, but it can make things “a little less different.” This succinct, effective story with its clear lines, compact figures, and visual language is as much an appealing graphic tale as it is a picture book.

From the ">September/October 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.