Blanca

A white little girl plays indoors in her safe white room and constructs a fantasy life for herself. At night she dreams of adventures in the world outside. Her own little world gets bigger and bigger. Then she’s back on her own again. Amid an interplay of text and image, readers and those who just look at the pictures are challenged to fill the gaps in the story. This poetic tale reads like a dream about a dream, and the repeating, sober lines by Paul De Moor take you by the hand and lead you through the delightful, subtly white but at the same time colourful dream landscape of a sleeping girl, who was inspired by a painting in her room as she fell asleep and re-experiences the day associatively. Or is it all in fact reality, and is the little girl ill and the text describing feverish delusions? Or is she in a kind of quarantine?

The minimal text is simplicity itself, but it does exactly what it is called upon to do. The sensory, slightly surreal illustrations in soft hues show how colourful white actually is. The quiet images in the first part of the book are in beautiful contrast to the more dynamic pictures in the second part, where the girl dreams of adventures and the indoor setting is opened up to overwhelming natural landscapes. ‘Blanca’ is a philosophical story about not being able to go out and being thrown back on your own resources, a warm ode to the imagination, dreams and desires.