We live in a time when to be a migrant or refugee is one of the commonest human conditions,” writes Janice Kulyk Keefer, who has memorably addressed the refugee experience in her award-winning fiction and a family memoir. In Anna’s Goat, her first children’s book, she approaches the same topic from the perspective of two young sisters.

Anna’s birth is a moment of joy for her family, who have been uprooted from their homeland to a “cold, dark country” during World War Two. While feeding baby Anna, Mother also nourishes the hopes of her eldest daughter, Wanda, with tales of the family’s former life in their hometown city of “parks and palaces.” Life gets even harder when the girls’ father is sent to work in another village. Mother, who works at a factory, worries about how to take care of the girls on her own. Her fellow workers find an unusual companion for the girls – a loving, protective, playful nanny goat. When the war is finally over, Anna and Wanda bid farewell to their beloved “nanny” and journey back to their homeland. Expecting a city of splendour, they are disappointed to find rubble. Once again, Mother turns to the consolations of storytelling, comforting Anna with tales of her unforgettable nanny.

Although it’s based on a true story, the omniscient narration lacks the lively immediacy and intimacy of memories being revived in the retelling. While Kulyk Keefer, with moving delicacy, dramatizes the refugee experience in general, she is less successful in capturing the specific circumstances of the sisters. That’s left to the richly emotive, expressive art of Janet Wilson. Her beautifully textured illustrations on coloured paper with Conté crayon are backlit by the golden glow of memory.