ACCESS DIGITIZED EDITION
Guide/Reviews Database
PICTURE BOOKS
Desnitskaya, Anna

A Star Shines Through

40 pp. | Eerdmans | August, 2024 | Trade ISBN 9780802856319 $18.99 | Ebook ISBN 9781467468381 $18.99
(2) K-3 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.
Reviewer: Deirdre F. Baker | Horn Book Magazine Issue: September, 2024

RELATED 

PICTURE BOOKS

Born Ready
by Patterson, Jodie
PICTURE BOOKS

The House of Grass and Sky
by Ray, Mary Lyn
PICTURE BOOKS

The Dog's Gardener
by Storms, Patricia
PICTURE BOOKS

And I Paint It
by Kephart, Beth
PICTURE BOOKS

Poem in My Pocket
by Tougas, Chris
More

Get connected. Join our global community of more than 200,000 librarians and educators.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

We are currently offering this content for free. Sign up now to activate your personal profile, where you can save articles for future viewing.

ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER?