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What did you like about the book? Stuck in the middle of an inhospitable desert outside Oasis City, JieJie and her little brother DiDi eke out a kind of life, communicating with their mom on daily treks to a old phone booth while dreaming of being reunited for the Moon Festival. Their ingenious adaptations to their harsh surroundings fill the first third of the novel as we watch them devote every ounce of their energy to retrieving water and preparing their meager meals. On Didi’s birthday, they can’t reach Mom, but then find a lithe, broken android in a slag pile of Oasis trash. Astonishingly, they manage to repair and activate the unit. Now in Mom mode, the droid tenderly assumes the children’s care, offering comfort, warmth, and bedtime stories. Frantic at being unable to reach her children, JieJie and Didi’s human mom returns, setting off a short-lived conflict before the little family can finally reach a new and loving equilibrium. It’s only in the second half of this astonishing novel that we see inside Oasis City (“a paradise with the purest air and water�), in which the human mom “works hard. She works like a robot.� The final pages offer a sliver of hope as the mom and her android counterpart create a modest but independent life, complete with emerging bits of greenery, which may eventually compete with the arid sand. 

Throughout the story, the characters communicate economically through simple speech using talk bubbles. Much is left to conjecture (what’s happened to the Earth, why the children are separated from their mother, who controls the planet) but Giojing’s astonishing artwork will help even young readers make sense of her dystopian setting. The grey and black color palette (possibly created with charcoal and graphite) and smudgy monochromatic style beautifully conveys the encroaching sandstorms and barren landscapes of the children’s world. Occasional pale accents of color immediately demand our attention: the faint orange “on� light for Mother, the dark blue sky she is able to evoke, or the pale green shoots that she manages to coax from the ground. In a brief author’s note, Guojing lets us know that the book also pays tribute to “left-behind children� in our own world, whose parents must leave to find work in cities or even other countries. Link to complete review: