‘The Three Sunflowers’ Blooms Again for Ukrainian Children

Initially inspired by a desire to bring comfort and help children make sense out of the world “in the wake of 9/11, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Hurricane Katrina, and the La Conchita mudslides,” writer Janet Lucy and her team at the nonprofit Seven Seas Press have recently turned their award-winning book The Three Sunflowers into a bilingual Ukrainian-English edition dedicated to the children of Ukraine. They are working in collaboration with the Stand with Ukraine Foundation in Los Angeles, which offers global and local support, to help get books directly into the hands of children affected by the war. 

After publishing the first book, a bilingual English-Spanish edition featuring illustrations by Colleen McCarthy-Evans, more than a decade ago, Lucy said that, “along the way, what I discovered, and I didn’t know this at the time, but sunflowers are an international symbol of peace.”

The story of The Three Sunflowers revolves around a turbulent day in a garden where this trio of sunflowers — the tall, wise Gloria; and the newer arrivals, Sunny and Solomiia (named for the daughter of translator Iryna Demchyshyna, who fled the war in Ukraine with her then-4-year-old daughter in April 2022, and stayed with an American host family for five months) — learn to face a series of unexpected and chaotic events that they have no power to stop.