When Annick, an older teenager living in Amsterdam, learns that the grandmother who has raised her ever since her parents’ death in an accident, needs a bone marrow transplant, it leads her on a journey that will take her across oceans and continents, and almost 70 years into the past. Searching for a perfect match, her grandmother has discovered that she was a Jewish girl adopted by a Christian family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Furthermore, there is a photo of her with someone who could possibly be her brother and prints on her wall signed by “Emma B.”
The graphic novel Song of a Blackbird alternates between Annick and her grandmother’s story in 2011 and that of the artist, Emma Bergsma, between 1943 and 1945. Like Annick, Emma is finishing high school and going out into the world, but her world is narrow and dangerous, with books and ideas banned and police everywhere. Emma and her best friends hear about a resistance print shop. Emma helps to smuggle Jewish children to safety while devoting her talents to making fliers and forging documents. From master artist Erik she learns the art of printmaking and uses the equipment to bring her drawings of her neighborhood’s buildings to life. One of those buildings is the theater where Jews were held before deportation; another was the church where Jewish children, cared for by nuns, were taken to adoptive families. That is where Annick’s grandmother was saved and the grandmother’s older brother hidden until he could be sent to a Catholic orphanage for the rest of the war.
Accompanying panels depicting Annick’s and Emma’s stories is the voice-over narrative of the blackbird who sees everything, everywhere. The blackbird follows Emma, encouraging her and her fellow resistance fighters, singing to her “not in spite of the dark…but BECAUSE of it.” The bird follows Annick and her new artist boyfriend as they travel to San Francisco to find the grandmother’s long-lost brother who wants to forget his horrific experiences under Nazi occupation and why his mother’s best friend adopted his sister and not him. The stunning panels combine black-and-white photos of Amsterdam under occupation with drawings that are also mainly black-and-white but contain accents of red, pale green, and orange.
This dual-timeline narrative follows the places featured in Emma’s prints – the theater, the school, the church, the office, the publisher, home. Back matter explains the significance of the places where Emma spends her days and Annick visits in search of clues to her grandmother’s past and a possible bone marrow donor. At all times, YA and adult readers will be propelled forward by the intense, action-packed, and moving story, and inspired by the artists and the blackbird who create beauty in the darkest of times, places, and circumstances. This is powerful story for our situation today, and one that employs the full potential of the graphic novel to tell it.
Written and illustrated by Maria Van Lieshout
First Second, 2025
ISBN 978-1-250-86982-1 (pb)
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You can buy a copy of Song of a Blackbird here. Book purchases made via our affiliate link may earn GLLI a small commission.Lyn Miller-Lachmann is the author of the YA historical novel Torch (Carolrhoda Lab, 2022), winner of the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature and a 2022 Booklist Editors’ Choice, and the YA verse novel Eyes Open (Carolrhoda Lab 2024), chosen by Booklist as a Top 10 Historical Fiction for Youth, 2024. She wrote the picture book Ways to Play (Levine Querido, 2023), illustrated by Gabriel Alborozo, and co-authored with Zetta Elliott the middle grade verse novel Moonwalking (FSG, 2022). Her nonfiction includes a biography of Temple Grandin in the She Persisted chapter book series from Philomel and Film Makers: 15 Groundbreaking Women Directors (co-authored with Tanisia “Tee” Moore) from Chicago Review Press. She translates books for youth from Portuguese to English, including the 2023 YA graphic novel Pardalita by Joana Estrela, published by Levine Querido, which was named a Batchelder Honor Book in 2024 and the graphic novel Our Beautiful Darkness (Enchanted Lion), by the Angolan author Ondjaki, illustrated by António Jorge Gonçalves.
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