Bright Star by Yuyi Morales (review)

“Child, you are awake!” says the text as a white-tailed fawn opens its eyes. “¡Mira! Some things you can see. Others you must find.” The fawn and its family begin to journey, but “No matter where you are, you are a bright star inside our hearts.” The direct address in English and Spanish continues as the fawn is stopped in its tracks by a towering, barbed-wire-decked wall, but nature and the narrator soothe it. A page turn then transforms the fawn to a girl, sitting amid the desert flora in “the most beautiful world,” and she’s joined by a cast of other people to be “a bright star inside our hearts.” The encouraging prose and the symbolism are lovely, but there’s more exhortation than engaging action, and the wishes are frustratingly abstract. The illustrations, however, are arrestingly gorgeous; Morales captures the flora and fauna of the Sonoran desert with tender fidelity, depicting a delicate Southwestern Eden teeming with life from peccaries to bats to flowering cactus and ruptured by the harshly looming wall. Touchable textures, including wool embroidery for some words, increase the fascination of the glowing scenes, and the final tableau of a half dozen people, perhaps a family, looking off intently as they wait, is hypnotic. The text alone will be a conceptual reach for most youngsters, but skilled prompting could get them to consider the implications of the visual journey, and they’ll happily lose themselves in the art. An extensive note describes Morales’ impetus for creating the book and her research on the desert ecosystem.