A mourning child, grappling with grief and seeking answers to a burning question, embarks on an action-packed adventure in the enigmatic picture book Drawn Onward, written by Printz Award-winner Daniel Nayeri (Everything Sad Is Untrue). Nayeri's palindromic text is economical yet, despite its brevity, likely to spark readers' curiosity and reflection. The lush, intricately detailed illustrations by Matt Rockefeller (Poesy the Monster Slayer illustrator) use visual pacing and a videogame-like structure to invite close inspection and expand Nayeri's narrative in multilayered ways.
The story opens with the child and a bearded, bespectacled adult sitting in sorrow beneath a painting of two parents and a child, all once happy: "She was gone," the text reads. In tears, the child escapes to the forest and pulls a sword from the ground. The fearful but determined child faces great dangers in the mostly wordless and boundlessly energetic adventure that follows: enormous spiders with glowing, fuchsia-colored geometric shapes on their abdomens; a fall from the inside of a mountain where kind, hooded miners work; and a plunge into the green sea, home to a glowing-eyed serpent. Midway through the story, the bereaved child asks a statuesque stand-in for his now-dead mother a question rich with yearning ("His heart needed to know... 'Mom were you glad you were Mom?' ")--and, reassuringly, receives a response that brings some measure of peace. As the child returns home, Nayeri's spare text, with only slight grammatical changes, repeats itself, bringing new meaning to the words and beautiful new adventures for the child who no longer believes "she was gone."
Rockefeller balances his palette between sun-dappled earth tones and jewel colors, incorporating glowing gems and iridescent flying creatures as integral elements of the story. The fuchsia jewels, in particular, punctuate the narrative and embody its emotional depth. The story takes place in one day, Rockefeller launching it with an image of the family cottage on the top of the mountain on a sunlit morning and closing the story with the cottage at night, a crescent moon shining brightly. The child's grief and determination drive this emotionally gripping narrative. The reunion of the child with both the deceased mother and the parent waiting at home offers comfort, likely leaving readers eager to return to the beginning to explore the story's many subtextual and emotional layers once more. --Julie Danielson
Shelf Talker: This emotionally astute tale of a child wrestling with maternal loss will appeal to fans of comics and the multilayered narratives of videogames.