Barbed Wire Between Us

Via a reverso structure and layered images, Wenjen and Encarnación trace the stories of two children, seemingly generations apart, in a haunting dual narrative of imprisonment and family separation. Spare reportorial lines and visual context clues appear first to describe the experience of a youth of Japanese descent interned during WWII; in a second sequence, the text’s reversal seems to follow a Latinx-cued child seized during a border crossing. Apparently held at the same camp in different eras, each child endures injustice, harsh sunlight and cold nights, and meager food, and both “experienced the kindness of strangers” and “created beauty with what little we had.” The two protagonists remain the most vivid elements amid pages of desaturated color; golds and browns dominate across crisp, high-contrast, shadow-limned illustrations of the earlier events, then shift to teals for the later ones. Hinting at cyclical patterns and repeating history, it’s a timely, personal-feeling picture book about injustice in “this land of promise.” Background characters are portrayed in shadow. More about the book’s background and poetic form, plus an author’s note, conclude. Ages 7–10. (Mar.)