Author: Alexis York Lumbard
Publisher: Wisdom Tales Press
Rating: warty!
Illustrated by Flavia Weedn
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
This is a children's book, mostly art with a line of poetry here and there, for children's sleepy-time (not bedtime! heaven forbid! Children will sleep when and where they want - just be sure to have this or something like it ready for when and where they're ready!
I'm not a believer in angels or a fan of stories about them - and particularly not young-adult angel stories! (that is until and unless I write the definitive angel story!), but young children are a different thing altogether, for which we all should be ever grateful. They need to have their imaginations titillated at every opportunity otherwise they'll grow up to be cantankerous curmudgeons like me! So if this is your thing, you might like to try this one, although I am not able to recommend it. There were several issues that I had with it.
The first is that the formatting is totally trashed on Kindle (at least this review copy was on mine), so I had to read it in Adobe Reader. The second is that I simply wasn't impressed with the text or the artwork. I'm not the intended audience and young children - the audience for whom this is intended - will probably not care, but it didn;t look very good to me. There's no real story as such here, just a simple rhyme which young children might find appealing, but it didn't seem to offer enough, for me.
This book is promoted as non-denominational, but I found that claim to be rather disingenuous. Angels appear in one form or another in several cultures, but they really are a very Christian fiction, especially these days, and especially as depicted here, in a western setting. I would have liked it better if the settings were more culturally diverse: if the angels were depicted as a variety of ethnicity, and were depicted as people doing more worthy tasks than floating around in clouds: not only nursing (which is depicted), but also soldiering, policing, and so on, and not even just the services for which we're normally grateful, for that matter; a school bus driver and a crossing patrol might have looked good here, too, amongst other things. As it was, the angels were not depicted doing much good at all.
It was really sad that the artist showed us nearly exclusively white, Anglo-Saxon "Catholic" angels, and the writer and publisher let her get away with it. Given that the bulk of the world's population isn't white, that seemed rather inappropriate to me, and misleading to children, so for this and the other reasons I've discussed, I'm do not feel comfortable in giving this story a worthy rating.
