BookDragon Blog

David Almond has been repeatedly popping up in my inbox recently. Not him personally (don’t I wish, as he is definitely one of my very favorite writers for young adult titles), but his mega-award-winning name is haunting my emails… I recently saw the latest stage version of his signature title, Skellig, in London. And then saw a mention in a random email that Tod Machover had done an opera based on Skellig – wish I’d seen that! Tod was my brother’s longtime advisor at MIT’s Media Lab (bro was on the never-finished 10-year plan). Apparently, a film version of Skellig is also floating around!

Last week at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, Almond won what is arguably the world’s top prize in kiddie literature, the Hans Christian Andersen Author Award for 2010 from the International Board on Books for Young People. And yesterday, I heard he’s coming to NYC as part of the Sixth Annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature; Almond will be part of “A Gathering of Voices” on Thursday, at the Instituto Cervantes, April 29 at 7:00 pm, if anyone going to be in town …

With all those signs to prod me, I picked up his latest (in the U.S. anyway) and couldn’t put it down. Raven Summer is a gorgeous, heartbreaking story of how families can so easily come together … and just as easily be torn completely apart. Liam and Max, are young teenagers on summer break, playing in Liam’s yard in rural northeastern England. Following a raven’s insistent call, the boys are led on a journey through fields and brooks, moors and footpaths, to what’s left of an ancient farmhouse where among the broken stones, they find a baby: “PLESE LOOK AFTER HER RIGHT. THIS IS A CHILDE OF GOD,” reads the scribbled note pinned to the baby’s blanket.

Indeed, every child should be ‘look[ed] after right.’ But Liam soon discovers otherwise. The baby is taken by the local police, and when no one claims the child, she is placed into foster care. Liam and his parents seek out the lost baby, now named Alison, in her new group foster home. There Liam meets two older foster children: Oliver, who has survived unimaginable horrors in his native Liberia, and Crystal, who lost her entire family to fire. The connection is instant … and Liam, Oliver, and Crystal will face a shocking future together.

Alternating between terse, stark bursts with languid verses on creativity and imagination, Almond offers another memorable story that confronts difficult, grown-up issues through younger eyes. The true price of war, xenophobia, fractured relationships, abusive parents, desperate children … and yet, somewhere in that very real world, families are formed and somehow still flourish.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2008 (United States)