Take your time with this book - you might notice the spots of colour on the cover. The boy is looking at a lady sitting on a park bench. It is clearly cold because they are both wearing scarves. Then look a little closer. Right in front of the boy is a fence of barbed wire and worse in the background you can see soldiers and a tank. But the boy is smiling and so is the lady on the seat. Is she the librarian?
Now turn inside and compare the front and back end papers. This will give you a strong sense that this story is sure to have a happy ending and that things do change for the people in this community. Now turn to the next page - it is filled with alphabet letters all floating into a dark sky. This image continues over to the title page where we see the young boy from the cover reading a book and significantly walking away from a pile of barbed wire towards some yellow flowers and a small bird.
The story then opens with a wordless spread. The boy can be seen celebrating his seventh birthday near the city library. Then the scene switches and men arrive with cannons and the library is destroyed. All of those alphabet letters from the previous pages are exploding out of the library which is also on fire.
"The town I live in is filled with people who are scared - like me. Our lights are out. Our water has stopped running."
In the street the boy sees a lady, the librarian, sitting on a seat reading aloud.
"Her words carry me back ... to my birthday. Before everything changed."
How lucky was I to find The Librarian's Stories. I was looking for a magazine in a newsagent and I spied a box of picture books almost hidden on a low shelf! I saw The Librarian's Stories - I think I have either seen this in library or read about it somewhere - then came the bonus - it was only AUS$5. I guess it is officially a remaindered book since it was published in 2020.
This story was inspired by Vedran Smailovic known as the cellist of Sarajevo who played his music for 22 days to mark the deaths of 22 innocent people killed after the bombing of a bakery during the Bosnian war. A second theme, as explained by Lucy Falcone, is to honour the thousands of libraries that have been destroyed over the centuries. Watch the trailer. And you can see inside this book here.
"Millions of books have been burned in the senseless violence of war. Many rulers in the past, and the present, feel threatened by stories, ideas and knowledge. They know that books can change people. They know that books can change the world. To them, this is dangerous. They don't want people to learn, to understand, to think for themselves. They don't want people to remember their history."
Companion titles:
I previously talked about this book illustrated by Anna Wilson:
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