Julie Danielson

Kim Hyo-eun’s splendid picture book, originally published in South Korea in 2016 and translated into English by Deborah Smith, is told from the perspective of a subway train in Seoul: “Carrying people from one place to another, I travel over the ground and rumble under, twice across the wide Han River.” Three full spreads introduce us to this unique voice before we even arrive at the title page.  

Everyone has a story, and the train listens to and observes its passengers closely, capturing the nuances of the personalities who board at many stations. There’s Mr. Wanju, always running for the train so that he can spend as much time as possible at home with his daughter. There’s Mr. Jae-sung, a cobbler who “can tell so much about a person just from looking at their shoes.” There’s Na-yoon, a student taking classes after school who is “so tired she’s barely awake.” In alternating spreads that briefly shift among the different riders’ points of view, we follow these characters into their lives beyond the subway’s cars.

Thanks to the subway train’s musings, readers gain poignant glimpses into the joys, sorrows and hopes of these passengers. The train’s voice is tender and compassionate, and the sound of its movement, “ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum,” is a refrain that anchors the book. 

Early spreads feature smudgy faces in shadow, but the faces of the riders whom the subway introduces are distinct and detailed. Kim’s eloquent, fine-lined watercolor illustrations capture the commuters’ humanity and the beauty in what might otherwise be dismissed as mundane. In a striking closing spread, “a gentle afternoon light . . . washes over everything,” and the image’s composition draws our attention not to the subway riders in the upper left-hand corner of the spread but to the light hitting the floor of the car—the extraordinary amid the ordinary. 

A poetic tribute to Seoul and its people, I Am the Subway makes for an unforgettable journey. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.

In the opening pages of Listen, a girl stands on her front porch, her backpack resting squarely on her shoulders. She is surrounded by the din of the city. “When you step out into the big, wild world, sometimes all you hear is . . . NOISE!” narrates an encouraging second-person voice. The girl follows the text’s advice to “stop, close your eyes, and LISTEN,” harnessing her attention to single out each individual sound as she walks. She hears a dog yipping at a car, a crow squawking on a power line, a teakettle whistling from an open window, gravel crunching under feet and much, much more. 

Once she arrives at school, the girl puts her active listening skills to work in new ways. When she overhears her classmate subjected to “words that sting,” the girl listens for “a sob, a sigh, or even silence” so that she can empathize and offer comfort. Finally, back home at the end of the day, the girl sits and listens to her breath as the text reminds readers to “hear the voice inside you.” 

Author Gabi Snyder’s engaging text speaks directly to readers, offering instruction as well as questions. “Can you hear ‘hello’ called across the playground?” she asks. The book’s back matter explores the difference between listening and hearing and the various types of responses we have to sound, such as the startle response. 

Illustrator Stephanie Graegin’s carefully composed, well-balanced spreads convey the busyness and bustle of the city while avoiding visual clutter. A soothing, cool blue dominates the color palette and provides a relaxing visual throughline for readers. 

The book’s design elements also work to support its theme. An appealing orange font emphasizes all the sounds depicted in the girl’s day, and the endpapers contain a series of small drawings that represent the sources of those sounds, such as a moving van and a boy practicing the trumpet. 

Listen is a gentle invitation to pause, close your eyes and appreciate every sound. It’s a welcome breath of fresh air. 

Poor Mouse. She lives with Cat, and needless to say, there are . . . problems. As Andrew Prahin’s Ship in a Bottle opens, Cat stalks Mouse in a series of very funny vignettes: “Mouse wanted to eat gingersnaps. Cat wanted to eat Mouse. Mouse wanted to enjoy the ship in a bottle. Cat wanted to eat Mouse.” In each image, Cat is always around the corner, eyes wide, a consummate predator. 

One day, Mouse takes her living situation into her own hands. She slips into the ship in a bottle and blows Cat a raspberry. Cat angrily shoves the bottle out the window and into the water below, and suddenly Mouse is free. So begins Mouse’s journey over land and water to find a safer home. Yet her “exceptionally pleasant” and peaceful adventure soon becomes distressful, thanks to selfish, cookie-obsessed rabbits, hungry seagulls and a huge, scary storm. Fortunately for Mouse, she eventually finds some kind new neighbors. 

Prahin masters the story’s execution on every level. He knows when to make the text short and clipped with perfectly dry comic pacing (“Cat wanted to lie in the sun. And eat Mouse.”) and when it should flow with rich imagery: “Near dawn, Mouse looked out upon an expanse of quiet trees and grass nestled among the towering buildings.” Prahin’s palette practically sparkles with warm, lemony yellows and carnation pinks juxtaposed against the sage shades of Mouse’s fur and the surface of the river. The dappled light on the water at the start of Mouse’s journey is particularly striking. All of the creatures’ body language and droll facial expressions (especially single-minded Cat) are entertainingly spot-on. 

Mouse’s persistence pays off in more ways than one, making this a satisfying story for anyone who, like Mouse, has “dreamed of a better life.”

Wishes begins as a mother and her three children pack in the middle of the night. They say a tearful goodbye to the family members who will remain behind, then wait in a long line to board a small boat for a perilous journey across the ocean. They survive crowded conditions, hard winds and rain, the turbulent sea and the searing sun, all in the hope of a new life.

Author Mượn Thị Văn structures this tale as a poetic series of wishes made by one of the children. As the girl watches her family pack food into a yellow knapsack, she imagines that “the bag wished it was deeper.” As a storm tosses the tiny boat, “the sea wished it was calmer.” The child herself holds dear a poignant and heart-rending wish: “And I wished . . . I didn’t have to wish . . . anymore.” This wish is revealed over the course of four spreads set against a brightening sky as a large vessel spots their boat, welcomes its passengers aboard and takes them to the shoreline of a grand, gleaming city.

Victo Ngai’s illustrations do much of the heavy lifting here, extending Văn’s spare, lyrical text in concrete, cinematic ways. Ngai doesn’t hold back, never once shying away from the journey’s traumatic elements. Sorrow, fear, distress, life-threatening danger: It’s all here. One spread, drenched in washes of red, puts readers right on the boat as people cling to one another, the narrator embracing her family with tears in her eyes. “The heart wished it was stronger,” Văn writes.

A closing note reveals that this powerful story is personal for Văn. As a child, she left her grandfather behind and traveled with the rest of her family from southern Vietnam to a refugee camp in Hong Kong, eventually settling in the United States.

This rich and nuanced tale illuminates the closely held wishes of refugees the world over. It’s unforgettable.

A girl and her abuela find an injured bird, bring it home and nurse it back to health in this unassuming tale. Inspired by one of Blanca Gómez’s own childhood experiences, Bird House is quietly delightful as it depicts an act of true kindness.

The girl narrates with gentle pacing from the moment the pair first notices the sunny yellow bird on a snowy day. After Abuela mends the bird’s wounded leg, they release it from its cage and allow it to fly around the living room. Their pet cat seems especially curious about the new guest. When the bird has fully recovered, they set it free, but it returns after the snow melts and spring arrives. “Abuela, can we keep it?” the girl asks. “No, darling, the bird doesn’t belong to us,” Abuela tells her.

Gómez reduces the story to its essentials, both verbally and visually. There are no feats of linguistic acrobatics; the text is plain-spoken and conveyed in short sentences: “It was fantastic,” we read as the girl watches the bird fly around the living room. Yet a sweet but never cloying tenderness pervades the story. The girl treasures the time she spends with her grandmother, observing that “everything was always fantastic at Abuela’s house.”

In spacious, uncluttered spreads, Gomez’s textured paper-collage illustrations contrast muted colors, such as Abuela’s charcoal gray cardigan and the powder blue of her tiled bathroom wall, against bright reds and yellows found in the furniture and living room floor. As spring arrives, gloomy winter makes way for the vivid greens of the plants on Abuela’s back porch. This is a story that breathes, and its artwork exudes a simple, timeless charm.

A young girl from the Dominican Republic relates the uplifting story of how she and her mother made a new life in Brooklyn in Starting Over in Sunset Park.

“My first trip in an airplane was from the Dominican Republic to New York City,” the narrator begins. Though she is homesick, she’s also awestruck by the beauty of New York, where she and her mother move in with her aunt and cousins. Eventually, they are able to find their own apartment, which the girl is excited about, though she still spends time reflecting on the home she left behind. In a moving spread, she remembers time spent with her abuela. Authors José Pelaez and Lynn McGee write the girl’s grandmother’s advice to her in Spanish, then translate it in a parenthetical, a technique they use throughout the book.

The girl struggles at school, where her English skills lag behind other students’, but she finds unexpected common ground with her teacher, who emigrated from Poland as a child. From that deeply felt experience, along with what she learns from her upstairs neighbor and a new job involving lots of cats, the girl gains confidence and begins to settle into her new home: “This strange new place began to feel a little magical.”

The unnamed girl’s first-person narration, one of the book’s strengths, is consistently authentic; she is vulnerable but tough, and her experiences reflect those faced by many immigrants to the United States. Illustrator Bianca Diaz’s bright, eye-catching palette radiates warmth with sunny yellows, brilliant reds and pinks, verdant greens and appealing blues and purples. A story full of vitality and compassion, Starting Over in Sunset Park will speak to all readers but will resonate most strongly with anyone who has ever made a home in a new country.

Acclaimed author and illustrator Peter Sís movingly celebrates Nicholas Winton, a “quiet hero of the Holocaust” in Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of the Holocaust and the Children He Rescued.

After briefly depicting Winton’s childhood in England, Sís turns to his years as a young man in Europe, swiftly setting the stage and laying out the stakes: Germany, under Nazi rule, is beginning to flex its military might. Instead of going on a ski vacation in the winter of 1938, “Nicky" accepts a friend’s invitation to come to Prague and changes the course of history. 

Next, Sís introduces 10-year-old Vera Diamantova, an ardent cat lover in Czechoslovakia in 1938. When the German army marches into the Sudetenland, a region on the Czech-German border, Diamantova’s parents decide to put her on a train to England. Her mother has heard about an Englishman who helps children escape the Nazis. “The Englishman,” Sís emphasizes, using a larger font for this sentence, “was Nicky.” Winton ultimately saved a total of 669 children. 

Sís relates these events with expert pacing as he juggles Winton’s extraordinary feat; Diamantova’s departure from her home and subsequent new life in England, as well as the loss of her family to Nazi concentration camps; a timeline of the war itself; and the quiet lives both led after the war ended. Winton "never told anyone about the children,” Sís writes. Nicky & Vera concludes with an appearance Winton made on the popular BBC television program “That’s Life” in the late 1980s that saw him reunite with some of the now grown children he saved.

Detailed, intricate illustrations on a muted palette of earth tones capture it all. Sís frequently and movingly incorporates smaller drawings inside of larger images. In the blueish spread in which Diamantova arrives at the train station in London, Sís shows a silhouette of her figure from behind; he fills the silhouette with colorful scenes of the family and home she left behind, a beloved cat and horse and the landscape of her home country.

In a closing note that provides more detail about Winton and Diamantova, Sís writes that he always revered more celebrated individuals, but “had not paid enough attention to the reluctant and quiet heroes.” This tenderly crafted, visually layered and deeply reverent book will help young readers do just that.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Peter Sís reveals what he learned about heroism as he wrote and illustrated Nicky & Vera.