November is Picture Book Month! Migrant by Maxine Trottier
Illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault. 35 p. Groundwood Books, 2011.
A little girl named Anna is a German Mennonite, who travels with her migrant worker parents each year from their home in Mexico to Canada each spring, then back again each fall, like geese. The flying geese motif is reflected in the beautiful end-pages, which is decorated with flying geese quilt pieces. Indeed, this gorgeous book could very easily fill two curricular areas quite nicely - language arts, for its lovely figurative language, especially similes and metaphors and social studies, for a migration, immigration unit.
As Anna wonders what it would be like to stay in her own place, have a bed or ride a bicycle, she feels like a jack rabbit, who lives in abandoned burrows as she and her mother try to make a variety of migrant worker housing feel homey.
The illustrations are beautifully rendered in mixed media - watercolor, gouache, crayons and collage in soft pastels. They reflect the various ways that Anna imagines herself and her family in gentle, surrealistic imagery. It's easy to see why it's a NYT Best Illustrated Book.