Yellow Butterfly: A Story from Ukraine
by Oleksandr Shatokhin; illus. by the author
Primary    Red Comet    72 pp.
1/23    9781636550640    $21.99

A Ukrainian author-illustrator shares a powerful wordless story about a child’s ability to process emotion and find courage amid the devastation of war. Blacks and grays dominate the somber early pages. A child surrounded by barbed wire is terrified as the wire seems to become an enormous spider. She runs away, trips on a rock, and falls. While looking up, she sees a butterfly. This spot of yellow, the only bright color after sixteen pages of black, gray, and white, allows for the possibility of change. Shatokhin builds on that feeling by having the girl follow the butterfly past silhouetted figures in scenes of despair, representing all she’s lost. Facing that loss unleashes her anger, and she rages, beating her fists against what turns out to be a bomb. The one butterfly becomes two, then four, the kaleidoscope gradually increasing until the dark no longer overwhelms each page. With yellow surrounding her, the child begins to see glimpses of blue sky. The barbed wire is replaced by butterflies, and in a final spread, people of all ages face a cloud of yellow below a bright blue sky, recalling the Ukrainian flag. While this is Shatokhin’s personal response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is also a way to help children wrestle with the ruin and fear of war and bear witness to the resilience of those living through it.

From the January/February 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.