Spanish / Mexico
El viaje de Malka
(Malka’s journey)
Rodríguez, Mónica
(text)
Varela, Alicia
(illus.)
Ciudad de México: El Naranjo, 2018. – 43 p.
ISBN 978-607-8442-70-6
Religion | God | Philosophy | Journey | Search | Death
Reading age: 8+
White Ravens issue: 2019
Malka’s grandmother has died and sailed away on a ship. Malka believes she’s sailed to God, and so heads out in a little boat to find God herself, accompanied by a marionette who is her alter ego cum nemesis, with whom she carries on conversations. Malka travels into the unknown. Initial certainties gradually dissolve as the girl learns about different visions of God among different people, cultures, and religions, as she makes travel stops on her journey. Who or what is God? How does he manifest himself and where can he be found? Is there even a God? In this children’s book, Mónica Rodríguez dares to pose the most difficult, basic, and intimate of human questions and to illuminate them from different perspectives in an inquisitive, unprejudiced, and open to doubt. She succeeds in creating an inspiring philosophical book and a poetic, highly literary story. Alicia Varela’s atmospheric, mysterious and highly figurative watercolour paintings illustrate the text in a congenial way.