Shake the Mango Tree [French/English Edition]

A young boy in the war-torn Congo makes an arduous journey to freedom in Beardsley’s children’s book.

On her dedication page, the author of this illustrated book for elementary and middle school readers makes it clear that Rupat, the young Congolese boy at the narrative’s empathetic center, is based on a real person, one of countless refugees displaced from their homelands by violent conflicts. (Beardsley’s earlier book, 2020’s My Heart in Kenya, explored a similar theme.) The spare but effective story is presented in both English and French. The text in each language is set against background colors complementing the adjacent, full-page, digital illustrations by Muthoni, which are rendered in expressive detail. The book begins in a village in the Congo where young Rupat lives and goes to school. In his yard is a tree heavy with “the sweet, sticky, juicy mangoes” he loves. Rupat’s peaceful life changes when he’s a teenager—civil war erupts, and the ethnic conflict reaches the family farm. Rupat runs from the “fighting and fires,” not knowing if he’ll ever see his family again. Without overt words or images of violence, the author invites readers’ empathy for Rupat’s desperation as his initial flight into the bush becomes a grueling, one-month trek of “two thousand kilometers,” mostly on foot, over the “Mitumba mountains, through valleys, to the edges of savannahs” with other displaced people. (They see wild animals, but “the only danger,” Beardsley chillingly notes, “was the rebel soldiers.”) The narrative is propelled by the determination that keeps Rupat and others heading for a safer life. In the face of hunger, fear, and injury, the discovery of a heavily laden mango tree becomes a moving symbol of hope. Rupat, whose successful later life is also related here, “can still remember” the sound of the falling fruit “meeting the earth, the footsteps of the children as they rushed to gather up the mangoes, the feeling of relief as they ate until their bellies were full.” The author affectingly describes how Rupat can still taste “the sweet, juicy, sticky, slippery yellow fruit. The taste of relief.”

Age-appropriate, powerful messages of survival, humanity, and hope.