all your Reads in Here

Khaled Hosseini, author of T he Kite Runner , brings us a picture book, that, at least in our library, is for adults. The illustrator of  Sea Prayer , Dan Williams, matches Hosseini's story with a sharp contrast in colors as the story unfolds. The biographical statement on the book's back flap says that Williams' illustrations accompanied an excerpt of A Thousand Splendid Suns when it appeared in The Guardian . Sea Praye r opens as a father tells his son, Marwen, stories of the past. Those stories are first from the father's own past as a child in Homs, Syria, but then they are stories of Marwen's childhood and his mother, of taking the young child to Homs, and experiences the boy doesn't remember. The early illustrations of that time, family stories, are in shades of greens and desert browns, living colors. But, the account becomes a story of protests, of bombs, of war. Those are shades of blacks, gray, dark brown, the colors and memories of the child Marwen. ...