Me and My Fear is the much anticipated companion book to Francesca Sanna's 2016 debut The Journey.
This time readers meet a girl who has just immigrated to a new country and is starting school. Fear is her constant companion, manifesting itself in the form of a small white humanesque blob. But though it's small, it begins to grow as her own questions and insecurities grow. How do you make friends when you don't understand the language? How do you sleep when your horrible fears keep you awake? The fear grows bigger every day until she learns that everyone has their own fears, too, and that sharing her fears with others is the best way to face them.
In true fashion, Sanna uses her space well. In this book she pays special attention to the white space, building the little fear manifestations into each spread by using what's around them. It's harder than normal to infer exactly where the fear begins and ends as is it gets bigger, mirroring the increasing unsettling feelings the girl has as her fears begin to mount. There are even a few spreads where the image itself has no boundaries because the white fear is too big for the page. But we also see the reverse as the girl learns that everyone else has fears, too: the pages get more colorful and the fears are contained within each spread to visually indicate to readers that fears are manageable and though they might not disappear completely, the most important thing is that we don't have to be scared alone.
This post contains affiliate links. For more information, visit my policies & disclosures page.
No comments:
Post a Comment