I was expecting Simone to be an immigration story or one about fitting in when you look different. I was
surprised to learn that the book was about strength in the middle of a traumatic event. This makes Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book relatable on several levels. Anyone can have a tragic event occur. Now, ours might not be a forest fire, but we could have had a flood, a loss of a home, or a death in the family. Simone (the character) is a young girl woken by her mother to quickly pack and leave their home as a wildfire is coming towards them. The story then flows into the story of the mother, a Vietnamese immigrant. Her story is similar, she had to deal with flooding when she was a young girl. And in the process of telling her story to her daughter, the strength and hope she had is given to Simone. At the shelter, it is then Simone’s turn to help others.
The best part for me was the use of the illustrations to express what is happening. The colors are used to show the feelings, emotions and situations by only allowing color to come into play when it is needed. The orange of the fire, the rainbow on the box of crayons, and then the explosion of color when the community of children at the shelter come together. Everything, even the gray/white and “sad” images, are dreamy, but the color images (especially the more dream settings) are mostly done this way. I took this from the Kirkus review: “Panels in varying shapes and sizes outlined by negative space give the narration a comic book-like structure, and dialogue primarily appears in speech bubbles.” This best tells how Minnie Phan’s illustrations are loveingly done and are as much a story in themselves as the text. Both support each other and are their own characters. The images help counter the more serious aspect of things.
The second best part, and a part that I would have liked to know more about, is the fact there is a second use of the color orange. Orange, of course, is used for the flames, but also another orange is used on the jumpsuits on the men who are fighting the fire. They are not regular firefighters, but have CDCR on them. They are prisoners from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation who have been used to help. I found this part interesting simply because there is a current television show (I tried to watch, but which did not grab my attention), that is based on this concept. Mixing a fiction story with reality is a neat way to show what happened.
Extras expand on the subject, and the author and illustrators experiences.
