Children's & YA
December 2019
The Middle
by Richa Jha and Eva Sanchez Gomez
The Middle is a story of a journey within a journey. A voracious reader, Azma, whose mind is full of questions as she reads, finds that the more books she consumes, the more the whys and hows in them consume her. One night, a torn scrap of paper floats into her room, carrying an incomplete line within its crinkles. She desperately searches for any missing words to complete the lonely phrase but failing at each attempt, she finally turns to writing her own beginning and end. The pages of The Middle are filled with surreal creatures - formidable, terrifying, looming – and these represent the fears and doubts of a mind struggling to make sense of the worlds captured within those books that only partially satisfy her as a reader. Azma embarks on an incomplete journey, ready to create its origin and end, finally realising the answers to all her impossible questions can only come to her when she writes her own version of the story. It is only then that the haunting creatures begin to soften and harmlessly melt away into themselves. Richa Jha’s lyrical prose and Eva Sanchez Gomez’s breathtaking visual poetry come together to narrate a tale that is both stunning and thought-provoking. For all the restless creative souls out there, The Middle presents an all-familiar trajectory of creating something new.
