Les Frères Noirs by Lisa Tetzner and Hannes Binder

 Les Frères Noirs

by Lisa Tetzner and Hannes Binder is a graphic novel for children  on a topic pretty ugly, but that in the past was common: children sold to nasty people for necessity.

Giorgio, we are in 1838 lives in a locality called Verzasca, his village is Sonogno. He helps his parents during the daily works and he is a good kid. One day a man approaches in a bar the father of Giorgio asking him of selling his son.

At first the father of Giorgio is not sure, but then, thinking also at the cost of medicines necessary to his wife for healing, accepts.

Giorgio, so, goes away from his house, his parents, and his normality, reaching with this man Milan where he will start to work as chimneyspeeper. It had to be just for six months, but the story will be different.

The family who gives him hospitality, apart for the daughter of mr. Rossi, sick, is disgusting. Giorgio is not fed up sufficiently, and he doesn't live with dignity. 

The work of chimneyspeeper is terrible: a horrible work for a kid, it alters respiration because lungs are in sufferance, and also, he doesn't receive any decent pay. One day, when he collapses, he will meet a doctor that will help him ... These children, chimneyspeepers have in the while created an association called Les Frères Noirs. Giorgio will become a member of the association and the doctor, when he will discover the real conditions of these children will help them.

Giorgio lives other misadventures thanks to the Rossi's family but then he will escape away, will search again for the doctor, receiving the sufficient help for becoming a new person.

Once grown-ups, with his wife, the sister of Alfredo, I don't want to spoil too much, Giorgio will return in his homeland. He tells to a man that he decided to become teacher because he wants to fight for a best justice.

It's a graphic novel, this one, illustrated powerfully well. Written by Lisa Tetzner, Lisa was also the translator of C.S. Lewis and Narnia; being Jewish she emigrated in Switzerland: dead in 1963 her books still resonates powerfully in our times.

Hannes Binder the illustrator works in Milan and Hamburg.

Highly recommended book.

I thank La Joie de Lire for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori