Peter Sís is one of my favourite picture book writer/artists, and if this doesn't draw the level of love from me that his Starry Messenger does, it's still both absorbing and fascinating. It's a graphic memoir of his childhood in Prague, behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Of course, as a child a lot of what is happening simply goes over Sís' head (and he finds out later that his parents are actively keeping the worst of it from him, such as an uncle killed by prison guards). Part of that ignorance, though, comes from the indoctrination that he and the other children are receiving in schools. Yet as he ages, doubts and questions creep in, alongside various art forms from the outside world.

It's the art that provides the narrative thread here. Sís is an artist first, and his intricate drawings have always been what's most attracted me to his work. Young Sís, clutching his paper and pencils, is everywhere present - there's even a panel of him hiding under a classroom desk during an atomic bomb drill, still frantically drawing. Often, his drawings are the only pieces of colour running through the panels. Copies of his real life drawings are used as background for extracts from his childhood journals, and you can see the awareness growing in him of what censorship and dictatorship and fascism are doing both to his community and to his art. It's disturbing and hopeful both, and the whole thing is just fantastic.