The Day My Father Became a Bush by Joke Van Leeuwen (review)
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Toda’s father, a pastry chef, has been called to war, and Toda’s city has become too dangerous for her to live in; she therefore must travel across the border to stay with her mother in a country where no one can even pronounce her full name. The setting here is contemporary but indistinctly European, with Toda having to learn an invented language that shares characteristics with Dutch, Flemish, and German as she adjusts to life in her new country. The main action of the story, however, is her rather harrowing journey to cross the border, during which she meets a slightly insane retired general and a deserting captain, who has found that his skills at command are limited to peace-time operations. Toda’s wide-eyed observations are laced with gentle humor that is always edged with a faint sense of dread, and the pen and ink drawings that augment the text have the same funny/creepy quality. This [End Page 184] tonal register indicates why van Leeuwen has won many awards in the Netherlands; she manages to effectively capture the late elementary sense of wary engagement in a dangerous and confusing world, maintaining a knife-edge balance between humor and terror. Toda wears her naïveté like body armor, and it gets her through; readers whose parents are in harm’s way will find in her a sturdy companion.
