The Light of Home: A story of family, creativity, and belonging, by Diana Farid/Illustrated by Hoda Hadadi, (Sept. 2024, Orchard Books), $19.99, ISBN: 9781338890617
Ages 4-8
Nur is a child who loves her home by the sea where she plays, enjoys time with her family, and fills her room with her artwork. Life drastically changes overnight when the family must leave right away; Hadadi illustrates the urgency of a family fleeing with the clothes on their backs, Nur grabbing a single painting off of her wall as her mother grabs her hand. On the next page, men bearing shovels and stick ransack the rooms and destroy what they can reach. Told in verse, Farid’s story of a family fleeing one home and moving to another is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking. Her exquisite verse finds the beauty in pain; as Nur and her family find places to live, she remembers the sigts, smells, and textures of home: “Sometimes, / [the horizon] breathes tangerine orange and sour cherry clouds, / like the sunsets she used to watch from a picnic blanket”. As the family gets used to living in a new city, in a building unfamiliar and loud, Nur uses her painting, desperately torn from the wall on the night of their departure, as the inspiration to create once again, this time of the “glittery path she loves / even if it’s far away”. Hadadi’s paper collage brings texture that make the memories tangible to readers, using vibrant colors and evocative images. The growing body of work on the refugee/immigrant/migrant experience is incredible and such an important part of collections. Don’t miss this one. Display and read with other stories, including Nicola Davies’s The Day War Came, Yuyi Morales’s Dreamers, Hollis Kurman’s Counting Kindness, and Hannah Moushabeck’s Homeland.
Mom Read It 