“You must be filled with expectancy. You must be awash in hope.”
Kate DiCamillo, winner of two Newbery Awards for The Tale of Despereaux and Flora and Ulysses (and a Newbery Honor for Because of Winn-Dixie), offers us yet another special tale with the deeper markings of a classic, a book likely to be in print generations from now.
DiCamillo has the special talent to gently weave subtler and darker emotions into settings and stories that are essentially eccentric, yet charming and sweet. With Edward Tulane, she takes the melancholy from the Littmus Lozenges in Because of Winn-Dixie and brings us a fable – a series of weaved lessons that can benefit adults as much as children.
The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is a story about a china rabbit who is beloved by a child – but meets that love with indifference. He then endures an odyssey of personal and emotional self-discovery. Harkening back to The Velveteen Rabbit, DiCamillo dives deep into the voyage of Edward’s heart, not just his china body.
“Someone will come for you, but first you must open your heart…”
Edward meets a broad range of lonely characters from all walks of life along his journey. From Nellie the fisherman’s wife, to Bull the itinerant traveler, to Sarah Ruth the sickly child, each temporary owner adds to Edward’s understanding of his place in the world and his need for love.
“If you have no intention of loving or being loved, then the whole journey is pointless.”
Along this journey, children and families will benefit from Kate DiCamillo’s mysterious, beguiling, and haunting prose. She creates quiet, quick, poetic pieces. And, the emotional effect of DiCamillo’s prose is magnified by the beautifully haunting illustrations of Bagram Ibatoulline.
The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is not a cheerful book, but it is bursting with well-earned, hard-fought love. Camillo acknowledges the nature of the story with an opening quote from Stanley Kunitz, author of The Testing-Tree: “The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking. It is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn.”
Edward has charmed scores of students and families looking for a deeper story with magical lessons. Let Edward’s miraculous journey charm and awe your families and show them the emotional power to be wrung from the most unexpected places – a children’s novel about a porcelain rabbit.