Readers I follow on social media make honest readers of others when they share their stats. They tend to be monthly and presented as a library card,  book journal, a Canva creation to share and monitor things like how many pages were read, how many were authors of color, or which categories or genres they fell in to.

I’m not there yet, but I have been sharing my daily reading via Instagram during the pandemic and I use Goodreads religiously (read: obsessively). So technically my stats are at my fingertips, but what I do want to do is look back at my month of books and feature at its end, the one book that was outstanding. It’s like a book club choice, but only I vote. And the criteria will mix the basics of best books (story, character development) with things like originality and longevity.

When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed

… which just celebrated its book birthday on April 14th. The story is a graphic memoir of Mohamed’s life with his brother Hassan in a refugee camp as told and illustrated by Jamieson. It’s her effortless and beautiful illustrations that bring together a difficult story for middle grade and high school audiences about the conflict in Somalia which led to Omar and Hassan’s circumstances: seeing their father murdered, their village burned, and their mother missing where for their childhood and teenage years they toiled in a very large camp with an older woman to look after them from the next tent over.

The story unfolds in several parts as it moves through time and it works with the narrative, dialogue, and illustrations to elicit an array of emotions that connect the reader. It will speak to any reader– being seen if you are a refugee, understanding if you are not. Jamieson and Mohamed chose to talk about the easy and the hard parts with the ups and the downs and provide an emotional punch in the afterword and author’s notes for a fully-developed arc that is only the beginning of stories from around the world.

The graphic novel is a gem for its format but also the contribution to the genre itself and one of the kinds of stories that I want to pull off the shelf for years to come.