September 2020 Big Picture

Girl on a Motorcycle

by Amy Novesky; illustrated by Julie Morstad

For one young Parisienne in 1973, a view of the Eiffel Tower isn’t enough, and she takes off on her motorcycle, bound for Elsewhere with just the substantial clothes on her back and “her life in a hand-sewn clutch and two saddlebags” stashed with bike repair, shelter, and first aid supplies, and possibly as important, a bikini, sandals, and a perfect white dress.

This isn’t a Phileas Fogg–styled challenge and she’s not committed to keeping wheels on the pavement, so an airplane isn’t cheating as she heads westward to travel by bike in Canada, then rolling on through Japan, India, Afghanistan, and Turkey before meandering back through Eastern Europe and home to Paris. She camps in Canada: “One night in the Yukon she floats in a warm pool that glows like a mirror. She can feel the earth turn.” Little girls in Bombay decorate her hands with henna and then guard her bike. There are bike repairs generously assisted by locals, segments of train travel, encounters with curious kids, possibly some loneliness, certainly welcome aloneness and freedom. In one particularly sensitive extended episode, she visits the giant carvings of Buddha in Bamiyan, Afghanistan: “The guide leaves her alone. I wish you all the happiness in the world.
. . . It just might be the most beautiful moment in the girl’s life.” She is approaching the close of her adventure and has no way of knowing that the Buddhas (destroyed by the Taliban in 2001) are also approaching the end of their existence. Novesky sidesteps their destruction but sends readers a fleeting reminder that the world moves on and no world heritage site can guarantee it will be around for travelers to tick it off a bucket list: “Fall is in the air. She will need to leave soon. She will never return. Early in the next century, these Buddhas will be gone.”

Morstad’s sophisticated, retro-chic artwork lovingly evokes the time frame dictated by the real life adventures of French writer Anne-France Dautheville, first woman to go around the world by motorcycle, chronicled in this picture book. Sketches and line drawings are overlaid with broad washes of color that shift as swiftly as the scenery through which the young woman zooms. The purpling sky of a Canadian dusk yields to the deep browns and greens of the girl’s campsite in the adjoining spread; sunbaked golds outside Kabul contrast with the rosy interior of a tea shop where she is the only female, surrounded by men and a boy variously peeking at or studiously ignoring her. The compositions, still moments on a reel of constantly shifting scenes, match the pacing of Novesky’s text to create a cinema vérité vibe, tantalizingly suggestive of clips that author and illustrator have left on the editing room floor. The result is part documentary, part dreamscape with strong crossover appeal for fans of history and of romantic adventure, all of whom will find their curiosity assuaged in an endnote that explores Dautheville’s experience (complete with photographic confirmation) and Novesky’s own dream-chasing research and interview.

Kids tightly tethered to their homes by pandemic, and even in better times by protective parents, may well ask: Seriously? Young people could do this? Gimlet-eyed readers will realize that it certainly took some bougie means to fuel boho dreams, but the short answer is yes. Young people could and did travel, sans cell, sans GPS, sans parents—avec postage stamps, avec paper maps, avec optimistic faith in the kindness of strangers. As families chafe under pressure of togetherness, this eminently sharable title arrives as soothing balm, stirring reminders of the world beyond household walls and offering images onto which each can attach a personal dream: Where is my “Elsewhere”? Whom would I meet? What would I see? (See p. 40 for publication information.)

Elizabeth Bush, Reviewer