BookBrowse Reviews Song of a Blackbird by Marie van Lieshout

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This graphic novel uses historical photos and the author's own illustrations to tell the intertwined stories of two young women in Amsterdam, one from modern day and one living during WWII.

In 2011 Amsterdam, Annick has just received life-altering news: her grandmother's siblings aren't bone marrow matches because they're not her grandmother's biological siblings. With her only clues a set of inked art prints featuring buildings around the city and the signature of the artist—Emma B.—Annick must discover the truth of her family's history before time runs out. In 1943, Emma Bergsma watches, horrified, as Amsterdam's Jews are forced on trains bound for concentration camps. When given the opportunity to join the Dutch Resistance, Emma decides her life is worth the risk and begins smuggling Jewish children to foster families and using her art skills to make forged documents… as well as a set of prints of buildings. Song of a Blackbird, Maria van Lieshout's first graphic novel, is the story of the intertwined lives of these two young women who will risk everything to help others.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the identity of the narrator: a blackbird. It's not completely unexpected given the book's title, but few books are narrated by an omniscient, reality-bending bird who uses its song to warn people, offer hope, and help guide people down the right path. At the beginning of Song of a Blackbird, the blackbird invites readers to soar with him as he follows Annick on her search for her family, and then links her story and Emma's, whose time in the Dutch Resistance was closely watched over by the bird. Throughout the story, the blackbird provides the reader with insights into characters' thoughts and with historical context behind people and places, as when he describes the Dutch Theater: "This temple of absurdity was once home to singers, dancers, and comedians, who would plead with me for big ideas… Then the Nazis came." He sees Emma's fear as she hides illegally printed ration cards: "I see you, Emma, as you're frantically stuffing printwork into your corset. I hear your breath trying to keep up with your hands. I feel your heart pounding in your chest." When Annick stalls in her first attempts to find the truth of Oma's family, the blackbird "nudge[s] her with force… tracking down Oma's story cannot be delayed."

As this is a graphic novel, artwork plays an important role both in the telling of the story and within the story itself. Annick's search for a living biological sibling of her grandmother is driven by a set of inked art prints, the only thing that remains of Oma's childhood, as everything else was lost when her home was destroyed by Allied bombs. The artist's signature and the buildings depicted in the images give Annick a place to begin her search. Those prints, we learn, were created by Emma in 1943 and '44—she draws buildings that have some significance to her, like locations where she lived or worked as a member of the Resistance, or buildings, like the Dutch Theater, that inspire her to keep fighting. She then uses a printing press to engrave her drawings into metal plates to create prints—a technique she learns while making illegal ration coupons. During the Holocaust and Nazi occupation, artwork like Emma's could be a symbol of hope and defiance: whether in the form of forged IDs and ration cards or of sketches and clandestine photographs that showed the truth that Nazis were trying to hide. This hope was not only for the victims of the Holocaust, but for the Resistance themselves; as Emma tells another member, "Sketching buildings strengthens me."

Each chapter begins with Annick seeking the story behind one of the prints in the series, working to determine the identity of the building and then visiting it to find out its importance to Emma. The story then jumps to Emma in the past and explores how that building played a role in her work in the Resistance. In one chapter, Annick and Oma visit an office building where Oma's father worked when she was a child, and Oma recalls that there was a hidden vault in the building, to which no one knew the combination. In Emma's time, that vault was where she took a young Jewish boy to hide until he could safely escape the Nazis.

Annick and Emma are both spurred into action by the discovery of a difficult truth—in Annick's case, that her family history is a lie; in Emma's case, that the Jewish people of Amsterdam are being killed. As the story goes on, more truths are revealed, and both characters reflect on how the atrocities of the war hid realities from people, whether accidentally or intentionally, and how people have been searching for the truth ever since. It wasn't uncommon for Jewish children like Oma, who were saved from the Nazis at a young age, not to remember their real identities, especially if their families were killed and they were raised by a foster family. Many people today, when doing genealogical research, are discovering that their personal histories aren't what they had believed—and in doing so, they are finding new connections to people and places and uncovering stories that had been forgotten. As the blackbird says, "Retelling. Remembering. This is how we keep stories and memories alive. This is how we keep people alive."

Fittingly for a story about the importance of discovering and revealing the truth of world events, Song of a Blackbird superimposes line drawings over real historical photographs of Amsterdam illegally taken during the war by a resistance group known as De Ondergedoken Camera (see Beyond the Book). In this way, van Lieshout incorporates her fictional characters into the real world of the Dutch Resistance—like an illustration of Emma drawn over a photo of resistance members working on a printing press, to show her inclusion in the group—and incorporates the real world, in the form of the photos, into her fictional world, such as when Annick looks at them in the memorial that was once the Dutch Theater. It's an interesting method of both setting the scene of the story—including showing how Amsterdam was desecrated by Nazis—and showing the reader that this story, while fictional, is based on true people and events. Song of a Blackbird is a beautiful and heartbreaking story of the horrors of World War II and how they continue to affect people to this day.

This review first ran in the February 12, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.