Walk with Me
by Jairo Buitrago; illus. by Rafael Yockteng; trans. from the Spanish by Elisa Amado
Preschool, Primary    Groundwood    32 pp.
3/17    978-1-55498-857-0    $18.95
e-book ed.  978-1-55498-858-7    $16.95

The book opens with an image of a young girl and a huge lion standing on a grassy hill, with a city skyline far behind them. The young girl offers the lion a flower and asks it to “keep [her] company on the way home.” Their journey is both mundane and dramatic, depending on whether you read the text or look at the pictures. Buitrago’s (Jimmy the Greatest, rev. 7/12) words tell a simple story of a young girl walking home from school, shopping for food, making dinner, and going to sleep. Yockteng’s illustrations tell a deeper story. The young girl, living in an unidentified Latin American city, is poor. Her socks are stained and droopy; the buildings in her neighborhood are dilapidated. Fog, or smog, hangs over the city. The illustrations further reveal that there is a violent political climate affecting the girl’s life: alongside the night table is a stack of newspapers with a headline that reads “Familias de Desaparecidos en 1985” (Families of the Disappeared in 1985), and though we see a photograph of the girl’s father, he is otherwise absent from the book. Buitrago and Yockteng present a beautiful and complex story of courage and hope where there seems to be none. There’s a clear resemblance between the lion and the father, particularly with the lion’s mane and the father’s curly hair. Such a parallel suggests that the young girl remembers her father for his courage, like that of a lion, and that she walks with that courage, giving her hope to continue.

From the May/June 2017 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.