Spanish / Argentina
El ascensor
(The lift)
Frankel, Yael
(text/illus.)
Buenos Aires: Limonero, 2019. – [38] p.
ISBN 978-987-47079-7-0
Elevator | Neighbourhood | Communication | Picture book
Reading age: 5+
White Ravens issue: 2020
This story is set in a space that’s easy to oversee at a glance: inside a lift that doesn’t arrive on the ground floor, no matter how often the button gets pressed. Instead, it shuttles between top and (near) bottom, collecting several residents of a house along the way: Doña Paula, Señor Miguel, and Cora with her little twins. Going up and down starts taking a little long, so to pass the time Doña Paula shares her home-made cake, and Señor Miguel tells the story of a bear who supposedly never “cares either way” about things. Time flies by. Meanwhile, the frame story and the second-level story-within-a-story flow into each other in the black-and-white pictures that feature a few red accents. In the end, everyone agrees that they “don’t care either way” whether or not the lift gets repaired. “El ascensor”, highly original both in its visuals and its text, comes in a narrow portrait format as befitting a long lift shaft. It captivates readers through its humour and a sense for the little, unexpected surprises of everyday life. [JW]