In Pulitzer Prize–winning Nguyen's latest, a Vietnamese American girl and her mother evacuate their home.Má wakes Simone from a dream, depicted in vibrant color, into a nighttime scene, portrayed in grayscale; the only color is a menacing orange outside their window, cresting the ridge beyond their street: "Fire!" Simone chooses important items to take, her crayons and drawings standing out in rainbow hues, and soon they're in their car. Simone sees firefighters in bright yellow as well as prisoners in orange from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, all working to extinguish the blaze. Má explains that when she was Simone's age, her home in Vietnam was flooded. The two arrive at a shelter in a school gym, where Simone sees an opportunity to use her crayons to help the other scared children. Panels in varying shapes and sizes outlined by negative space give the narration a comic book–like structure, and dialogue primarily appears in speech bubbles. Stunning illustrations, rendered in graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor, are soft, focusing less on the characters' fear and more on community and cooperation in the face of disaster. Afterward, Simone returns home having made new friends and armed with the knowledge that everyone is capable of being a helper. In a closing note, Nguyen and Phan discuss the 2020 California wildfires and their impact on San Jose's Vietnamese American population.A powerful, multilayered depiction of an increasingly common situation. (author's note) (Picture book. 4-8)

In Pulitzer Prize–winning Nguyen's latest, a Vietnamese American girl and her mother evacuate their home.Má wakes Simone from a dream, depicted in vibrant color, into a nighttime scene, portrayed in grayscale; the only color is a menacing orange outside their window, cresting the ridge beyond their street: "Fire!" Simone chooses important items to take, her crayons and drawings standing out in rainbow hues, and soon they're in their car. Simone sees firefighters in bright yellow as well as prisoners in orange from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, all working to extinguish the blaze. Má explains that when she was Simone's age, her home in Vietnam was flooded. The two arrive at a shelter in a school gym, where Simone sees an opportunity to use her crayons to help the other scared children. Panels in varying shapes and sizes outlined by negative space give the narration a comic book–like structure, and dialogue primarily appears in speech bubbles. Stunning illustrations, rendered in graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor, are soft, focusing less on the characters' fear and more on community and cooperation in the face of disaster. Afterward, Simone returns home having made new friends and armed with the knowledge that everyone is capable of being a helper. In a closing note, Nguyen and Phan discuss the 2020 California wildfires and their impact on San Jose's Vietnamese American population.A powerful, multilayered depiction of an increasingly common situation. (author's note) (Picture book. 4-8)

PreS-Gr 4 —Colored pencil, graphite, and watercolors in digital illustrations provide soft sweeps across the page, showing events as if misty through memory, and rendering up a sad story in a way that is resonant for young readers. These events take place in panels (prettiest comic-book style ever) that depict a nesting of stories. First, the young narrator is dreaming in color before black-and-white scenes show her evacuation from a safe home threatened by forest fires and then a journey to a large room where other families are gathered. Her mother tells of her own loved one, facing floods in Vietnam. The narrator becomes part of a group of children drawing, and goes from feeling helpless to hopeful that she and other children will take matters such as climate change into their own hands. The quiet strength of the narrative is that it stretches a sense of urgency across generations but never becomes overwhelming. The pictures carry this same sense of calm. With wildfires, like hurricanes, now part of the sort-of-ordinary catastrophes of modern life, the book offers calm, reasoning, and memory as scaffolding for a child's determination regarding her future. VERDICT A book one doesn't see coming, Simone glows like a small, steady flame of childhood agency.—Kimberly Olson Fakih