Hands Around the Library

Gr 3-6–During the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, hundreds of young people, led by library director Ismail Serageldin, joined hands around the world-famous Alexandria Library to protect it from damage by the marching crowds. Although much property was destroyed and many people died, the library survived unscathed.  Roth and Abouraya invest this story with emotion and suspense by adopting the point of view of a fictional librarian at first caught up in the excitement of the march, then worried about the library, then proud of her countrymen for this act of love and peace. Roth's collage art is, as always, especially appealing to young people. Her naive, frontal compositions are constructed from brightly colored paper in a variety of textures: crinkled, fuzzy, fibrous, corrugated, and even iridescent. Protest signs in Arabic appear throughout the book, and though one page contains images of violence, in general the energy, scale, and potential havoc of the march are skillfully communicated by  spreads depicting large crowds. The back matter is especially informative: it includes  the history of the ancient and the modern Alexandria Library, a brief discussion of the Egyptian Revolution, a few translations of words on the protest signs, and, perhaps most importantly, photographs of the events described in the book. These pages use collage representations of quilt squares as a border, suggesting that the immense crowds that marched in Egypt were made of a kaleidoscope of unique individuals. Paula Willey