When the Wind Came

Written by Jan Andrews

Illustrated by Dorothy Leung

Kids Can Press

978-1-5253-0339-5

32 pp.

Ages 4-7

June 2022

 

When the Wind Came is a story of reminiscences. Its narrator, a pig-tailed child who loves to read, recalls how life was on their family farm. It may be a different time, with a mother pulling out weeds by hand and with an earthen root cellar for storing food, but its story is one for all time. 

From When the Wind Came by Jan Andrews, illus. by Dorothy Leung

Living on a farm, a child remembers her father tending the cattle, her mother weeding with a baby playing on a blanket nearby. She also remembers that baby brother whimpering endlessly while she reads beneath a tree. And then the wind comes and everything changes.

I remember my mother

grabbing up my baby brother.

I remember her running 

with him in her arms.

 

I remember my father opening

the door to the root cellar.

She remembers the darkness and the silence, and then coming out to witness the destruction of that wind. 

Our home was gone

when we came out.

From When the Wind Came by Jan Andrews, illus. by Dorothy Leung

As they attempt to retrieve anything that might have survived, her mother cobbles together some food, and it is the child's job to clean the dishes.

I don't know why I did it.

I wasn't even thinking.

Maybe I was crying.

Maybe tears were running down my cheeks.

What she did was make bubbles.

We may hear of devastating storms more nowadays because of media reporting and people sharing on social media but those catastrophes have always been there and those who've endured them do just that. They endure. They pick themselves up and get on with things. Even with unfathomable destruction and losses, they try to go on. They find food and do dishes and maybe even have a laugh before they leave it all behind. And Jan Andrews takes us into their family and their pain and their tenacity. She makes us feel the child's frustration with a wailing baby, the force of the storm, and the ruination of their home. She also gives us a family living off the land, accepting nature's unpredictability, and always showing resilience.

The youngCanLit world lost a literary legend when Jan Andrews passed unexpectedly in 2017. She could write it all: picture books, middle grade, short stories, and young adult novels. She was always a storyteller (first president of the Storytellers of Canada) who'd won the Silver Birch Express Award in 2012 for When Apples Grew Noses and White Horses Flew: Tales of Ti-Jean, was awarded the Order of Canada, and was nominated for multiple Governor General's Literary Awards. Even five years from her passing, we have another extraordinary tale of resilience housed in a story of tragedy. The storm that brings the wind and destroys the family farm is pivotal but it's the response to that catastrophe that is the true story. It's a story of seeing beyond the dark, finding a lightness in that gloom. The wind may have brought destruction and despair but it also revealed that which was there all along: resilience. It was creating sparkles of joy from soap, bubbles that entertained and distracted and changed nothing and changed everything. From something little during something monumental, faith for a future was found.

Dorothy Leung is a new pencil (and paint) creator in children's book illustration and she impresses with her take on this important story. The vastness of the farm setting, the force of that storm, and the normality of a family's response are all evident through her use of colour and shape. The contrast of the dryness of those fields and the power of that destructive wind is almost tactile, and definitely convincing. She has fortified Jan Andrews's story with her art.

We will continue to hear about devastating weather and its impact on communities but Jan Andrews and Dorothy Leung's picture book shows us that, when the winds come, there will always be stories to tell of resilience and possibility.