Spanish / Chile
Desde lejos
(From a distance)
Segovia, Alexis
(text/illus.)
Santiago: Claraboya Ediciones, 2024. – [44] p.
ISBN 978-956-9825-43-9
Loneliness | Picture book | Rural life | Child labour
Reading age: 8+
White Ravens issue: 2025
In a remote house in the vastness of Patagonia, a family leads a very modest life. The children help with feeding the livestock and making fires, or they play with glass marbles. One day, the oldest son – still a child – must leave the family to work on the farm of a neighbour who lives far away. »Desde lejos« is a quiet book that, despite its simple, restrained language and delicate pictures, has a strong impact. Only in an afterword does the author comment that the story (also) deals with child labour. The pictures drawn with graphite and coloured pencils express the boy’s feelings of loneliness and homesickness, as well as his remarkable calmness and composure. They clearly show how his emotions and the story’s mood shift: from subtle colourfulness to the sepia-tone brown-yellow reminiscent of old photographs, to the grey on grey of a shadowy world, into which a little colour returns only at the very end, when the boy is on his way home to visit his family for the first time. [JW]