Jenny Angel

Jenny believes herself to be a guardian angel who can keep her dying younger brother safe if she is vigilant enough. She wills Davy to live, working hard to bring the world to him as he gradually slips farther away. But magical thinking cannot work the miracle Jenny longs for and the book depicts touchingly how her denial of death is transformed into acceptance. Spudvilas’s eloquent illustrations in this large format picture book are full of tender feeling.

Death was also the theme of Wild’s picture book Old Pig (illustrated by Ron Brooks) published in 1997 in which a granddaughter mourns the loss of her Grandmother. The theme of a child’s death, as in Jenny Angel , is even more disturbing and challenging for young readers as the natural order of things is out of sync and Wild uses no anthropomorphic devices in this book to distance the young reader from such a difficult topic. Wild’s depiction of Jenny finding a way to accept her loss is, however, so sensitively conveyed that young readers can only be enriched by it.