The Night Voyagers

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Kushner’s newest work joins titles like Barbara Smucker’s Days of
Terror and Underground to Canada in telling the stories of persecuted
peoples who have undertaken perilous journeys in their quest for a safe
haven. This story concerns the exodus of political refugees from Central
America in the 1980s. As the story opens, the Cardenas family,
consisting of mother Sonia and sons Manuel and Pepe, all illegal
immigrants, are being hidden in an Arizona church by members of the
sanctuary movement—concerned Americans working to prevent the U.S.
government from repatriating refugees to murderous regimes.

Interconnected with the story of the Cardenas’s risk-filled journey
across America to their destination in Canada is a story “narrated”
by Manuel, who has been rendered mute by the horrors he observed in his
homeland—horrors involving his schoolteacher father, one of the
“disappeared.” Traveling with Manuel are the spirits of two street
children, also victims of government oppression; and the Lords of
Xibalba, voyagers from the Mayan Land of Death, who try to lure Manuel
into joining them in their place of darkness.

Middle-school readers should respond to this tale about a contemporary
but largely unknown event that involved much personal suffering and
heroism. Recommended.