WISH YOU WERE HERE

In a tale spun from truth, a kind writer helps a child keep in touch with her lost doll.

As the story goes (related years later by a friend of the writer), once when Franz Kafka was walking in a Berlin park, he met a mother whose child, Saskia, was in tears. Learning that the child had lost her doll Christiana, he began bringing her postcards he’d gathered in his travels with notes from the doll about her visits to places such as Paris and Venice. The original missives being lost, Watts follows Larissa Theule—author of Kafka and the Doll (2021), illustrated by Rebecca Green—in crafting imagined ones…and in adding both names and a tidier ending of her own. Here, Franz finds a doll in a secondhand shop and oversees a joyful reunion just before he dies (offstage) from pneumonia: “‘No,’ said her mother. ‘We will not meet Franz again. He has gone to another place.’” (Though Saskia initially notices that Christiana looks different, Franz explains that the doll’s travels have aged her.) The spare but emotional tale will charm readers; they’ll pore over the lavishly detailed scenes of the solitary writer’s apartment, packed with mementos and domestic items, as well as views of small figures strolling wide European streets and of the errant doll posing with landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower in the background scenes. The cast is light-skinned throughout.

Sensitive, tender, and gorgeously illustrated.