REVIEWS

A Kirkus Best YA Book of 2024!
One of Betsy Bird’s Caldenotts of 2024!

★ “Two globally acclaimed creators—author Stridsberg and illustrator Alemagna—join forces in this boundary-pushing picture book for older readers translated from Swedish. Positioning the park as a liminal space, the spare, poetic text and beautifully unsettling art explore its endless possibilities as children play and wander... As readers explore these surreal, dreamlike landscapes that contain both rich dark colors and bright, intense ones, they become immersed in text that can be interpreted as a meditation on childhood’s fleeting and changeable nature... Contemplative teens on the cusp of independence and adult readers nostalgic for the mysteries and wonders of their early years will linger and ponder. Wondrously strange and wonderfully evocative.”  —Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW

★ “Taking a deep look into the emotional life of children, this thoughtful narrative uses spare, poetic language in a lyrical first-person perspective. Thickly layered illustrations further encourage an emotional response, as the vivid, sometimes jarring colors demand attention and add to the tone of instability. The narrator recognizes that the park, like life in general, … is a place of many possibilities, a situation that is both frightening and thrilling. This evocative picture book could connect with middle- or high-school readers and inspire them to consider their own pivot points, the places of security, and the events or people who helped them grow.” —Booklist, STARRED REVIEW

★ “Why do we go to the park, and what happens when we are there? Decorated poet Stridsberg carefully considers these questions in spare yet biting verse, in translation from the original Swedish. The poem captures the bittersweet overlap of the freeing joy found in outdoor exploration in an urban park with the burgeoning existential anxiety that comes of growing up, and the persistent need to cope with it in a meaningful, connected way. Alemagna’s deeply luminous and at times startling illustrations complement the tone of the poetry beautifully, adding layers of abstraction and interpretation without being at all condescending to the deceptively complex subject. Occasional empty white spreads give readers much room to develop their own imaginings as well.” —School Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW

“We Go to the Park appears under the independent children’s publisher Enchanted Lion’s newish imprint, Unruly, ‘dedicated to making space for picture books created… for teen and adult readers.’ It’s a worthy aim… The book’s illustrations evoke the delight of unsupervised play, the jitters of new friendship and the weirdness of having ants crawl up your leg. Alemagna, who was born in Italy and lives in France, is one of the world’s great living illustrators, and she’s particularly sensitive to the experiences and inner lives of children… The format here is unconventional. In addition to wordless spreads and pages that mix text and illustration—layouts that will be familiar to most readers—the book contains many text-only spreads, which are less common in contemporary picture books. Sometimes the words on these spreads inform our view of the pictures that follow, and sometimes they change our understanding of illustrations we’ve already seen. This is a book that rewards careful attention and offers children considerable interpretive leeway. Park-goers—and picture book readers—know well the thrill of uncertainty and the joy of freedom. They will recognize We Go to the Park for what it is: a place to play.” —Mac Barnett, for the New York Times

“The park as a place of contemplation, illumination, and discovery comes alive with great soulfulness in We Go to the Park—the product of an unusual collaboration between Swedish author and playwright Sara Stridsberg and Italian artist Beatrice Alemagna... When Stridsberg received a selection of [Alemagna’s] impressionistic unstoried images, she was moved to respond with her own art. Her spare, lyrical words gave the pictures coherence, making of them something uncommonly lovely: part story, part poem, part prayer. Though spoken by children playing in the park, the collective pronoun seems to expand in widening circles as the vignettes unfurl until it becomes the voice of humanity, making the park a miniature of our restless search for meaning, an antidote to the ordinary world where ‘everything is so big there’s no room for it inside of us.’ There amid the thousand-year-old trees that ‘stretch their branches toward the sky like old hands,’ we encounter ourselves in all our yearning, all our incompleteness. We Go to the Park is part of independent children’s book powerhouse Enchanted Lion’s inspired Unruly imprint of picture-books for grownups—or, rather, wonderfully category-defying books emanating Maurice Sendak’s insistence that an authentic life is a matter of ‘having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of.’“ —Maria Popova, The Marginalian 

“With a thick cardboard cover and marvelous endpapers that somehow manage to be both colorful and murky all at once, the book opens with two blank pages on which are printed the following words: ‘Some say we come from the stars, / that we’re made of stardust, / that we once swirled into the world / from nowhere. / We don’t know. / So we go to the park.’ … This is a story that taps into the nostalgia that teens and adults feel when they look back at a time when going to the park was all that they wanted to do, as kids. This is punctuated by wordless spreads on a regular basis. Alemagna has eschewed her usual love of fluorescent colors... It’s beautiful and a little muted, but never boring. The same could be said for the text. It feels translated but, at the same time, isn’t stilted in any way… Lovely and odd.” —Betsy Bird, A Fuse 8 Production (a School Library Journal blog)

“The park offers refuge to the child who narrates this uninhibited prose poem... Evocative text from Stridsberg [and Alemagna's] blots of color and streams of expressive line show children playing on fanciful structures, in meadows and clearings, their emotions—contentment, exasperation, joy—readable in their bodies. The park is a place of liberation and passion, the creators convey.”  —Publishers Weekly

“Not to be missed… This remarkable collaboration between two acclaimed creators—a Swedish novelist/playwright and an Italian artist—invites teens and adults to reminisce about and reconsider simple trips to the park through a surprising lens. The pairing of otherworldly paintings with brief, deceptively simple lines of text turns ordinary playgrounds, fields, and woods into landscapes of endless possibility.” —Laura Simeon, Young Readers’ Editor, Kirkus Reviews

“Wondrous and also mysterious… With its breathless free verse, insistence on an immediate excursion, and dramatic refusal to leave,  Stridesberg has managed to capture not only the narrator’s passion for their local park, but also give voice to our universal longing for the natural world… An elegant and unusual picture book that originally appeared in Swedish and has been smoothly translated.” —Susan Harari, Keefe Library, Boston Latin School (Boston, MA), Youth Services Book Review