Maxine Trottier, illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault
Migrant
Groundwood, 2011.

Rating: E

Anna and her family are migrant workers. She wistfully wonders, "What would it be like to stay in one place - to have your own bed, to ride your own bicycle?". Even though her mother tries "to make a home of yet another empty farmhouse", the "ghosts of last year’s workers" remain. She compares herself to a jackrabbit, living in abandoned burrows. During the day, she feels like a bee and imagines herself dipping and rising over her parents working in the hot vegetable fields. At night, she’s like a kitten, curled up with her sisters, sharing a bed and a sense of security together.

When the family ventures into town to shop for groceries, she feels the sting of stares from the locals. Not understanding the language, the different conversations she overhears sound "as though a thousand crickets are all singing a different song". Anna wishes she could be "like a tree with roots sunk deeply into the earth", but her hopes are dashed in the fall as her family packs up their belongings and moves yet again.

Isabelle Arsenault’s charming gouache, crayon and collage illustrations capture Anna’s imaginative musings. They show the small child soaring through the sky like the migrating geese. The colourful endpapers are decorated with "Flying Geese" quilt patterns.
This book is poetically written and conveys Anna’s authentic emotions. Children will empathize with Anna and an author’s afterword provides more information about the hardships faced by migrant workers.

Thematic Links: Mennonites; Migrant Workers

Linda Ludke
Vol. 17, number 1
October 2011

*Rating System:
E - Excellent, enduring, everyone should see it!
G - Good, even great at times, generally useful!
A - Average, all right, has its applications.
P - Problematic, puzzling, poorly presented.