AUTHOR: Fabiola Anchorena
PUBLISHER: Kalandraka
GENRE: Children's book
READER’S NAME: Lynn Eddie-Zambrano
DATE: August 10, 2023
A wildfire has just leveled historic Lahaina town on Maui. The toll in human life continues to rise; the destruction - homes, churches, businesses, the natural environment - is unimaginable. A 150 year-old banyan tree, a local treasure and home to hundreds of mynah birds, was severely burned; miraculously, it may survive. Uncharacteristically low humidity, heat and 80 mph winds spawned by a hurricane 800 miles away fanned the fire. This is climate change.
It's been a long time since we last saw the sun. Or the moon. And there's been no rain… Has the sun grown tired of coming out each day? These are the concerns of the Amazonian animals in Esperando el amanecer as they narrate, in one voice, the new reality they are living. Curious and worried, they set out together in search of their morning light and warmth. Walking, flying, hopping, swimming, the reader moves with the animals through the book's pages. They are lured innocently toward the glow of a false sun - a forest fire! - and flee in retreat in a rain of burning embers.
Esperando el amanecer is a picture book for pre- and early primary school audiences. A single intriguing illustration of the rainforest and its animal residents fills the entire length of each pair of facing pages. The text, sparing and precise in its selection, partners in perfect symbiosis with the illustrations to relate the animals' story. Vocabulary and syntax are simple. Parallel structures create a rhythmic cadence within and across pages, linking one to the next. A skilled translator will be able to emulate the patterns.
As Anchorena states in her afterword, forest fires and by extension, wildfires, are a universal and increasingly frequent phenomenon. Children up and down California, the state where I live, have experienced days, several in a row, when the sun did not come out as smoke from fires over a hundred miles away choked the skies. They've had to wear masks; some have had to evacuate, or worse yet, lost their homes. Anchorena is right: forests are the lungs of the world. Esperando el amanecer is an ideal way to introduce a discussion about the very special role forests play in maintaining the health of the global ecological system and climate change to young children.
