cover image Threads: From the Refugee Crisis

Threads: From the Refugee Crisis

Kate Evans. erso, $24.95 (176p) ISBN 978-1-78663-173-2

Evans, an English activist, travels to the French town of Calais to work at its overcrowded and impoverished refugee camp. For the Middle Eastern and African refugees who gather there, it’s a one-in-a-million shot at legal passage to England; for France and Britain, it’s a political football. As the refugee crisis deepens, the camp loses its already-limited resources and desperation spreads. Evans draws the people she meets, their makeshift homes and gathering places (the lean-to restaurant “3 Star Hotal” gets rave reviews), and her own pink-haired, increasingly frustrated self, all sketched in rough colored pencil and framed in lace, the historical industry of Calais. Between vignettes, she pastes social-media comments from Brits angry that one of their own is aiding hated foreigners. Evans’s art is shaky, but her ground-level view of ordinary life in the camps offers a rare nuanced, human look at a world most people only glimpse on the evening news. (June)