Picture Book Month Day 9

Welcome back to my series of 30 posts celebrating my favourite Picture Books. Of course thirty books are just the 'tip of an iceberg'.  On this blog I have posted reviews of close to 900 Picture Books and there are easily another 9000 I could share with you. 

Here is a wonderful Canadian picture book which I first saw in a public library in Austin Texas. Even though it is not an old book (published in 2018 Groundwood Books) it was almost impossible to purchase this book here in Australia and I could not find any library copies. Luckily I found a second hand copy (in mint condition) which had been tossed out of a public library - Winnetka-Northfield Public Library in Illinois, US. I suspect this may have happened because the book was labelled with the theme Growing on the spine followed by the author name Gay.  This book is actually about the refugee experience and making new friends and communication. 

Here is the bookseller blurb from Book Depository: Mustafa and his family traveled a long way to reach their new home. Some nights Mustafa dreams about the country he used to live in, and he wakes up not knowing where he is. Then his mother takes him out to the balcony to see the moon - the same moon as in their old country. In the park, Mustafa sees ants and caterpillars and bees - they are the same, too. He encounters a "girl-with-a-cat," who says something in a language that he can't understand. He watches an old lady feeding birds and other children playing, but he is always looking in from the outside and he feels that he is invisible. But one day, the girl-with-the-cat beckons to him, and Mustafa begins to become part of his new world. Marie-Louise Gay's remarkable ability to write and illustrate from the perspective of a young child is movingly exhibited in this gentle, thoughtful story about coming to feel at home in a new country.

Kirkus, their star review, said this book is: An invaluable resource for those working with children from resettled refugee families as well as host communities.

Mustafa