We Go To the Park / Playgrounds

We Go To the Park / Playgrounds

Sara Stridsberg & Beatrice Alemagna

Original Title
Vi går till parken
Published
Mirando bok, 2021
Genre
Picture books
Pages
74
Rights Sold
Italian
French
Korean
English World
Complex Chinese
Macedonian
Tags
, , , ,

We Go To the Park / Playgrounds

Sara Stridsberg & Beatrice Alemagna

We Go to the Park is a picture book for children and adults of all ages – about play, childhood, and the universal question of where we come from.

Some say that we come from stars, that we’re made of stardust,
that once we swirled into the world from nowhere. We don’t know.
So we go to the park.

Some pages are just illustrated, on others the text gets all the space for itself.

The park is a forest in the city. It is the land beyond.
In the park, anything can happen. Sometimes so much happens
that the whole world is overturned. Sometimes nothing happens at all.
It doesn’t matter. We just want to go there.

Playgrounds is a one-of-a-kind project that can be read on many levels. It is boldly designed – almost as big as an LP, with raw edges and a special binding.

Press voices

With her latest work, the book Vi går till parken (Let’s Go to the Park), published by the Swedish publisher Mirandobok and written by Sara Stridsberg, [Beatrice Alemagna] offers stunning proof of how art can represent a period of global crisis, such as the prolonged pandemic emergency, through a style that is both poetic and enlightening, without any trace of bombast.” —Award Statement, Bologna Children’s Book Fair 2022

Here is a bit of a lesson to every adult about changing one’s perspective, about adults’ inability to simply be in the present. Every sentence in the book merits pondering awhile…with illustrations that swell and almost overflow with color.” —Sveriges Radio

We Go to the Park appeals to everyone who has played and fantasized, plays and invents, or might be swept up by the imagination and the fantasy created through play…[a] full-fledged artistic adventure by Sara Stridsberg and Beatrice Alemagna.” —Dagens Nyheter

The text is at once lyrical, philosophical, and precise; the illustrations arrestingly beautiful. A pure pleasure!” —Svenska Dagbladet

The illustrations are painterly—rendered in earth tones, they are a little ominous, and tantalizingly magical. The text is spare, well-considered, and poetic…indeed, this is a book (and a park) in which the reader, too, wants to stay.” —Ystads Allehanda

[A] successful interplay between poetic text and dreamlike illustrations…an artistic adventure for all ages. A gem among picture books! Overall rating: 5 [out of 5].” —Christina Wedenmark, BTJ-Häfte

What a picture book!” White Ravens Catalogue 2022

000
Awards
Selected — White Ravens Catalogue 2022

The Extraordinary prize at the Bologna Ragazzi Award 2022