A Kirkus Best YA Book of 2024! One of Maria Popova’s Marginalian Favorites of 2024! One of Betsy Bird's Caldenotts of 2024! Selected for the USBBY Outstanding International Book List, 2025!STARRED REVIEW! ? “Two globally acclaimed creators—author Stridsberg and illustrator Alemagna—join forces in this boundary-pushing picture book for older readers translated from Swedish. Positioning the park as a liminal space, the spare, poetic text and beautifully unsettling art explore its endless possibilities as children play and wander... As readers explore these surreal, dreamlike landscapes that contain both rich dark colors and bright, intense ones, they become immersed in text that can be interpreted as a meditation on childhood’s fleeting and changeable nature... Contemplative teens on the cusp of independence and adult readers nostalgic for the mysteries and wonders of their early years will linger and ponder. Wondrously strange and wonderfully evocative.”
Kirkus

STARRED REVIEW! ? “Taking a deep look into the emotional life of children, this thoughtful narrative uses spare, poetic language in a lyrical first-person perspective. Thickly layered illustrations further encourage an emotional response, as the vivid, sometimes jarring colors demand attention and add to the tone of instability. The narrator recognizes that the park, like life in general, … is a place of many possibilities, a situation that is both frightening and thrilling. This evocative picture book could connect with middle- or high-school readers and inspire them to consider their own pivot points, the places of security, and the events or people who helped them grow.”
Booklist

STARRED REVIEW! ? “Why do we go to the park, and what happens when we are there? Decorated poet Stridsberg carefully considers these questions in spare yet biting verse, in translation from the original Swedish. The poem captures the bittersweet overlap of the freeing joy found in outdoor exploration in an urban park with the burgeoning existential anxiety that comes of growing up, and the persistent need to cope with it in a meaningful, connected way. Alemagna’s deeply luminous and at times startling illustrations complement the tone of the poetry beautifully, adding layers of abstraction and interpretation without being at all condescending to the deceptively complex subject. Occasional empty white spreads give readers much room to develop their own imaginings as well.”
School Library Journal

A Marginalian Favorite of 2024! "The park as a place of contemplation, illumination, and discovery comes alive with great soulfulness in We Go to the Park—the product of an unusual collaboration between Swedish author and playwright Sara Stridsberg and Italian artist Beatrice Alemagna... When Stridsberg received a selection of [Alemagna’s] impressionistic unstoried images, she was moved to respond with her own art. Her spare, lyrical words gave the pictures coherence, making of them something uncommonly lovely: part story, part poem, part prayer. Though spoken by children playing in the park, the collective pronoun seems to expand in widening circles as the vignettes unfurl until it becomes the voice of humanity, making the park a miniature of our restless search for meaning, an antidote to the ordinary world where 'everything is so big there’s no room for it inside of us.' There amid the thousand-year-old trees that 'stretch their branches toward the sky like old hands,' we encounter ourselves in all our yearning, all our incompleteness. We Go to the Park is part of independent children’s book powerhouse Enchanted Lion’s inspired Unruly imprint of picture-books for grownups—or, rather, wonderfully category-defying books emanating Maurice Sendak’s insistence that an authentic life is a matter of 'having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of.'"
The Marginalian