2022
After seeing her art in Duckworth, the Difficult Child last year, I've really wanted to seek out more work by Julia Sarda. Most of her illustrations appear in books written by others, but The Queen in the Cave is entirely her own.
Queen is a children's picture book. Like Lorena Alvarez's Nightlights, it tells a story that can either be read straightforwardly as a ghost story, or seen as a complex and ambiguous metaphor for a young girl's turbulent emotions as she grows up. Read the second way, there isn't a single, simple interpretation, I don't think, although this may be a case where 'if you know, you know,' and I just don't.
Oldest sister Franca gets touched by an idea (or a ghost?) and can no longer read, make her collages, or focus on anything at all. She is convinced that there is a queen in a cave out past the family yard, and drags younger sisters Carmela, dressed like a witch, and Tomasina, dressed as a clown, on a journey to go meet the witch.
They go through the yard to the forest, passing through nettles, and having increasingly frightening encounters with insects, bats, and a parade of ghosts. Carmela and Tomasina are scared and want to turn back, but Franca insists they continue on.
At the cave, they meet the queen, who looks identical to Franca, except she's filthy, covered in mud and leaves, with wild eyes and flyaway hair. Franca wants to stay and celebrate and dance. Her sisters are scared, and she ignores them, so they leave, return home, have dinner, and go to bed. (I did wonder, at this point, about their parents! But they are never mentioned.)
Sometime in the night, Franca returns, looking halfway between her old self and her feral doppelganger, after hours of dancing and playing in the cave. Carmela wonders if someday a coven of witches who look like her will call to her the way the queen called to Franca.
Sarda's art is stylized, with very clean lines and colors. She makes good use of negative space for her backgrounds, but then fills the foreground and intermediate space with detail - from the tchotchkes on shelves in the girls' house, the the increasingly phantasmagoric creatures they meet on their journey through the woods.
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