….feels alone without his mama.
On Saturday, children’s author and illustrator Anna Dewdney passed away in her Vermont home after battling with brain cancer for more than a year. She was only 50 years old.
Jacob and Libby are only 16-months old. As such, we are still relatively new to the children’s literature section of bookstores and of the library. But Baby Llama we know well; after I read the book in our local bookshop, it both made me smile and cry a little, the sign of a very good book, indeed.
Dewdney “. . . emphasized that ’empathy is as important as literacy’ when it comes to educating children. ‘When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language . . .We are doing something that I believe is just as powerful, and it is something that we are losing as a culture: by reading with a child, we are teaching that child to be human. When we open a book, and share our voice and imagination with a child, that child learns to see the world through someone else’s eyes.'”
Thank you, Anna Dewdney, for creating a book that my children love so much that we have to hide it. There is no higher praise I could give you than that.
