Samira, The Singing Salmon
Samira, the Singing Salmon is Deanna Barnhardt Kawatski’s first children’s book. She collaborated with her daughter, Natalia Vanessa, who produced sixteen pages of mesmerizing paintings to accompany the text. This fanciful tale traces the actual journey of the sockeye salmon. “Samira, the Singing Salmon is a beautifully lyrical story about the life cycle of a salmon. Through Samira’s songs the reader understands her desperate urge to return to her birth stream to spawn, and sympathizes with her as she struggles through the difficulties of her journey. In her final song “Round and round we go…” the reader weeps with her as she nears the end of her small part in the universal cycle of life from birth to death.”