Cristina plays

Micaela Chirif and Paula Ortiz
Bogotá: Cataplum, 2021; São Paulo: Companhia das Letrinhas, 2024; Canada and US: Orca Books
ISBN: 978-958-53005-7-6

♦ Highly Recommended by Fundalectura IBBY Colombia
♦ Winner of Los Mejores 2022 – Poetry, Banco del Libro

The space of secret play is at the heart of this book, written in a poetic key and illustrated with careful attention to every detail of a dollhouse—one of the settings where the action unfolds. The vibrant color palette seeks to transport us to another time and space. Through both words and images, this book becomes a proposal that will, quite literally, surprise the reader.

Reviews

Could we bring together the transitional object of childhood, poetry, and graphic ingenuity in a book that is, at the same time, a museum? Prescribed to create a refuge—immense and powerful within ourselves—Cristina Juega, written by Micaela Chirif and masterfully illustrated by Paula Ortiz, forms a perfect trio with Cataplum Libros, a publisher truly deserving of recognition.
Something beautiful, small, and delicate becomes something immense and protective. Between them, beauty and imagination have always existed—because play, as we have insisted so many times, is the highest work of childhood. It teaches us about all the possible paths, as well as the untamed ones.
Lucas Insignares