Staff Picks: Kids Comics About Displacement
by nicole
When the place you call home is taken away, where do you go? These stories follow kids from all over the world who have been displaced, and their journeys to find home in a new place.
Stealing Home by J. Torres | Request Now
Sandy Saito looks back to his childhood in 1940s Vancouver when he was eight years old. He's a happy kid: he goes to school, reads comic books, and is obsessed with baseball -- especially the Asahi baseball team, the pride of the Japanese-Canadian community. Then the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor -- and everything changes. The kids Sandy used to play with every day now call him names and chase him from the playground. He and his family are no longer permitted to go outside at night or visit certain areas of the city. Japanese Canadians are stripped of their rights, their jobs, and their homes, and soon the government begins to round up Japanese families, sending them to internment camps. It isn't long before Sandy's family is among them. David Namisato's detailed art depicts the 1940s setting with cultural and historical precision, following Sandy and his family as they are forced to leave their home and relocate to a prison camp comprised of crowded, makeshift barracks in a remote site without electricity or running water. The theme of baseball, Sandy's favorite sport, adds a message of hope and renewal to this historically accurate portrayal of a grave chapter in both Canadian and American history.
The Circuit: Graphic Novel by Andrew Rostan | Request Now
Francisco’s family leaves their small town on the outskirts of Guadalajara for the promise of a better life in California. Making their way to Mexicali, they dig under the wire fence to cross the border, finding employment in the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley as migrant farm workers. An early memory has a five-year-old Francisco watching his infant brother while his parents and older brother pick cotton. It’s a hard life: constantly moving and uprooting themselves to find work; substandard housing, education, and medical care; and the entire family making sacrifices, both physical and emotional. This story is an honest and evocative account of a family’s journey from Mexico to the fields of California—and to a life of backbreaking work and constant household moves—as seen through the eyes of a boy who longs for education and the right to call one place home.
When Stars are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson | Request Now
Omar and his younger brother, Hassan, have spent most of their lives in Dadaab, a refugee camp in Kenya. Life is hard there: never enough food, achingly dull, and without access to the medical care Omar knows his nonverbal brother needs. So when Omar has the opportunity to go to school, he knows it might be a chance to change their future . . . but it would also mean leaving his brother, the only family member he has left, every day.
The Librarian of Auschwitz by Salva Rubio | Request Now
Out of one of the darkest chapters of human history comes this extraordinary story of courage and hope, which follows the true story of Dita Kraus, a fourteen-year-old girl from Prague. Dita lives an ordinary life until the day she is taken, along with her mother and father, from the Terezín ghetto in Prague to join the many people imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Dita is adjusting to the constant terror that is life in the camp, when Jewish leader Freddy Hirsch asks her to take on an important job: to keep and care for the eight precious volumes the prisoners have managed to sneak past the guards and into the camp. She agrees, and so Dita becomes the librarian of Auschwitz.
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