The younger-sibling lament "I miss all the fun" gets a fresh, visually flourishing workup in Kallie George and Elly MacKay's The Secret Fawn, in which a girl finds a way to redress the perceived injustice of having been born second.
"This morning, Mama saw a deer. Dad and Sara saw it too./ But I didn't.... I always miss everything." It's a bitter pill for a kid who wasn't tall enough to pick the first apple from a tree--her older sister had that honor. And guess which sister was robbed of the chance to see some shooting stars because of her early bedtime?
Determined to spot that deer, the narrator heads outside and starts looking. After several false alarms--she sees a flash of brown, but it's only a dog, and so on--she plunks down on the grass and waits. Her patience is rewarded with a sight more meaningful than a deer: "A fawn.... Quiet as a whisper. Little like me."
George (Wings of Olympus) imbues The Secret Fawn with an air of enchantment, and yet to create her dazzling art, MacKay (Red Sky at Night) turns to media no more mystical than ink on paper. The book's sun-kissed earth tones seem to sit on the page in three dimensions, practically inviting the reader to touch, say, a whorl of dog fur. The pixie-dusted mood lingers when the girl returns home, where her mother asks if she has seen the deer. The girl shakes her head--"Because I didn't," she thinks. "I saw its fawn." Forsaking bragging rights: Isn't that a mark of maturity? --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author