ILLEGAL (graphic novel) Written by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin. Illustrated by Giovanni Rigano.

 

Published in 2018 by Sourcebooks Young Readers.

Illegal is the fictional story of two young brothers from Ghana: Ebo and Kwame. While it is fictional, it is based on lots and lots of true stories.

Most Americans are very aware that immigrants/refugees are fleeing from their native countries and arriving at the border of the United States and are not aware that a similar thing is happening in Europe. 

Europe has a similar refugee/immigrant situation. People are fleeing from the wars in Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. There are also refugees fleeing the brutal poverty and political situations in sub-Saharan Africa. Like in the United States, these immigrants/refugees depend on very shady people to move them closer to their goals.

In this story, two young brothers named Ebo and Kwame live in a village in Ghana. They are orphaned and living with a useless, drunken uncle. They have an older sister that has already crossed the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea to look for work but they don't know anything about where she ended up or how it is going. 

Kwame is the older brother and he has decided to sneak away and try to get to Europe. He doesn't want to bring along his little brother because he is concerned about his safety, it will cost twice as much if they both go, and there is a superstition that says only one family member should make the trip at a time because it is so dangerous that it just seems all the more likely that there will be a loss in the family.

Ebo will have none of this. He immediately sets off to find his brother at his first stop - Agadez, Niger. Agadez is a city of a little more than 100,000 and serves as the launch point to try to cross the Sahara Desert.

The Sahara is too big to cross on foot so migrants trying to cross it have to have money to pay unscrupulous smugglers (much like Mexico's infamous coyotes.) This is not cheap.

If a migrant is lucky enough not to be robbed and dumped in the desert they arrive in Libya and pay smugglers for a boat ride across the Mediterranean Sea and try to land in Italy or Sicily. This is also not cheap.

Ebo and Kwame work various menial, under the table manual labor jobs while living on the streets and avoiding the police. Life is cheap, hard, brutal, and dirty - yet no one talks about turning back.

My review:

This is an excellent graphic novel. The parallels with the American refugee crisis are striking and equally heartbreaking. I learned a lot and I enjoyed the easy to follow art work as well.

I rate this graphic novel 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: ILLEGAL - Written by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin. Illustrated by Giovanni Rigano.