The Bog Baby

Jeanne Willis has written more than 80 titles, including picture books, novels, and television scripts. She has also won numerous awards, including the Sheffield Children’s Book Award and the Silver Smarties Prize. Her teen novel, Naked Without a Hat, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award in 2004. She often takes inspiration from dreams and interesting conversations with strangers. She lives in England.

Gwen Millward studied illustration in Edinburgh and now spends all of her time painting and writing stories for children about her favorite subject, beasts. Her first book, Guess What I Found in Dragon Wood, was published in April 2007. She lives in England.
From the Hardcover edition.

PreSchool-Grade 3—The narrator, now a mother herself, tells about an event in her childhood. She and her sister break a rule and get caught in a lie. It starts when they go fishing alone in the springtime bog and catch a bog baby. They want to share their love for their new pet with their mother, but they just can't tell her where they've been. Like budding cryptozoologists, they describe each part of the little round creature with wings "no bigger than daisy petals," and create for it a habitat, a bucket filled with shells, gravel, and water. The glorious illustrations reveal a lush dreamscape of a backyard flush with tendrils, bluebells, Queen Anne's lace, birch trees, cherry trees, dragonflies, ladybugs, and more, all delicately and minutely drawn, and painted in watercolors. The child-voiced, economical narrative transports readers into the squelches and squeaks of tromping through the mud and spring plants, and straight into heartbreak when the beloved bog baby gets sick and hides under shells. Luckily readers can venture vicariously into the twilight bog when the sisters return their pet to its natural environment, and again when the narrator's child, the next generation, joyfully discovers that their sacrifice resulted in the proliferation of this dubious species.—Sara Paulson-Yarovoy, American Sign Language and English Lower School PS 347, New York City END