Readers take a quietly splendid journey with a mother and infant son as they come to the United States from Mexico to make a new life. How strange and difficult it is not to understand the language in this new place, and not to be understood. “One day we bundled gifts in our backpack,” says the mother as they bid goodbye to Corazón, but still their journey as migrantes, as caminantes, is daunting. Then one day, given their own resourcefulness, hopefulness and the welcoming nature of the public library, they discover books. Wonderful books with vibrant pictures and a few words. Picture books that open up their new world in stories. Books become a home where they do not need to feel confident in speaking the new language but where they can grow to understand, to learn, and eventually to speak, write and read in English, bringing all their own gifts as soñadores to the process.
Author and artist Yuyi Morales shares her real life story with readers in an afterword, where we learn that the book Dreamers is based directly on her own experience bringing her young son Kelly to America. Her artwork is a radiant blend of images drawn from her old world and her new world. Her use of the word “dreamers” is not just the same as when applied to undocumented immigrants, common today. Being a dreamer, for her, captures the passions and hopes all immigrants carry with them, no matter what their status, as they navigate the passage to a new land. Morales shares, also, a spectacular list of the books that were special to her and her son as they visited the public library: classic picture books, inventive visual stories, bilingual narratives, poetry, and story collections. This book, also available in a Spanish language edition, brims with possibility for all readers. Ages 4 up.
