MY UNCLE IS COMING TOMORROW

A bench and a closed door mark the milestones in an excited child’s life.

The child grows older as they faithfully await a beloved uncle who never shows. As the protagonist sits watching the door, they excitedly note the things they’ll tell their uncle about: their progress in school, an upcoming move, their new son. In scene after scene, time trundles on as the child evolves into a teen and then an adult and finally to nothing but a memory in the fruitless anticipation of a dream never realized. The uncle, it is later explained, has become one of the “disappeared.” Santana Camargo’s deceptively simple black line drawings against stark white paper allow for no meandering of attention. The protagonist’s—and readers’—focus is on the door that remains shut. Each unwaveringly hopeful line begins with “Great!” in anticipation of the visit (“Great! Then I can tell him about this girl that I like”)—and in contrast to the unseen bleak reality. The author’s unsentimental bilingual text, in English and Spanish, gives no hint as to the reason behind the protagonist’s continued pining—until the afterword, which states that though people have disappeared throughout history, during the Cold War, many governments began using the practice as a “systematic instrument of terror.” Though, according to the backmatter, this story takes place in South America, Santana Camargo notes that people have been disappeared in other places, such as Indonesia. The protagonist has few facial figures and skin the color of the page. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A hard truth for hard times.