Silent Night, My Astronaut

Detailing the first ten days following the outbreak of war in the Ukraine, this title follows Ia and her family as they learn to navigate their new lives and face the conflict brought to their doorstep. Her father leaves on day two to fight for Ukraine, by the end of the first week Ia and her mother are spending increasing amounts of time in the basement in Kyiv with complete strangers. By the second week, the mother and daughter have experienced a more prolonged attack and make the difficult decision to leave their much-loved city to find a temporary sanctuary. Crucially, we leave the family at this point – in a perpetual state of transience, which accurately reflects the situation still for so many Ukrainian familes.

Silent Night takes the form of diary conservations between Ia and her ‘astronaut’, something she believes will help to keep her safe. The diary is somewhere she can share her concerns as she faces the difficult challenge of processing and understanding the conflict in her home city, but this is expertly and sensitively handled, so that the diary is also interspersed with some of the regular feelings and tribulations of any other child. For this reason, the relationship between the child protagonist and the child reader builds easily, and the sparse and emotive language selected when crafting such simplistic and frank statements also adds authenticity: ‘I want to sleep in my bed so badly, but we sleep on the floor in the corridor’.

Threaded throughout the diary entries are some important themes: safety, family, activism and the reader is invited to consider these themes, whilst also reflecting on what it might be like to have your daily freedom so heavily restricted. Ia admits she doesn’t like going to school because she doesn’t enjoy maths, but she still wants schools to exist; she has learnt to love silence and to fear noise; she resorts to squats as a form of exercise but still finds ways to tease her mum for stopping at 46. It is this sense of the familiar in an environment so very different from their own that so beautifully helps the reader begin to comprehend how life in Ukraine has changed.

This considerate crafting is wholly matched in Stepanishcheva’s emotive illustrations. They are often as simplistic in concept as the text, but it is this simplicity that makes them sing. Each image carries so much heart, and the careful consideration of colour palate to reflect the mood at times, and to consistently and proudly reflect the colours of the Ukrainian flag are stylistic choices which really help to envelop the reader in Ia’s experience. A superb title for fostering empathy and understanding.