While children’s books have grappled with difficult topics for a long time, in recent years more picture books have tried to tackle topics that are not just hard but also complex and political. Kashmira Sheth’s 2026 picture book Taking Flight is one of those.
In careful, gentle, at times poetic, and always well-paced prose Sheth tells stories of disruption and forced immigration. Readers don’t get names of characters or countries to start. Instead, we get words (and, in Nicolo Carozzi’s sweeping but muted illustrations, images) of love, loss, and leave-taking.
People have to leave their homes and parts of their families, for reasons that are never specified (though one family flees “the loud BOOM of war”). The different families spend time in refugee camps, then, eventually, travel on to new countries.
These new places overwhelm with how different they are, in pace, language, senses, and history, and fill the newcomers with doubt and fear…until one child reaches out at lunch, others reach out at recess, others after school, and these lost and longing kids eventually belong.
This book is written, as I said, in prose, but the precision of the emotion and pace makes it feel like a poem. This is the human side of the refugee experience. It aches and evokes.
