Helen's Birds

From Sara Cassidy, acclaimed author of A Boy Named Queen, comes a stunning wordless graphic novel about friendship, loss and hope.

For as long as Saanvi can remember, she has been friends with her elderly neighbor Helen. They play cards and garden together and, especially, care for the wild birds that visit Helen's yard. When Helen dies suddenly, a "For Sale" sign goes up, and movers arrive, emptying the house of its furniture and stripping the yard of its birdfeeders. The sparrows and hummingbirds disappear.

Soon a bulldozer tears down Helen's house. All winter, Saanvi walks numbly past the property as developers begin to build condos. Then one spring day, amid the dust and turmoil of construction, she finds a weathered playing card wedged between two rocks. She holds it to her chest, and finally sobs.

After a tearful night, Saanvi wakes inspired. She slathers peanut butter on pinecones to hang from tree branches, hammers together a birdhouse from scrap wood and drags a kitchen stool outside to hold a bowl of water. Finally, she retrieves a nest that has been unraveling on Helen's old property and places it in a tree in her own yard. Saanvi's yard soon fills with Helen's birds. They have a home again.

This beautifully illustrated, wordless graphic novel shows Saanvi's journey through close friendship, then hollowing loss and change, until she finally finds hope.

Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.1
Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

Sara Cassidy is a journalist and editor and the author of ten novels for young readers, including A Boy Named Queen. Her books have been selected for the Junior Library Guild, and she has been a finalist for the Chocolate Lily Award, the Bolen Books Children's Book Prize, the Rocky Mountain Book Award, the Diamond Willow Award, the Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Children's Book Award, the Manitoba Young Readers' Choice Award and the Silver Birch Express Award. She has also won a National Magazine Award (Gold) for a piece in Today's Parent. She lives in Victoria.

Sophie Casson has illustrated a number of children's books, including The Artist and Me by Shane Peacock, a finalist for the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, and Quelle pagaille! by Danielle Marcotte and Laurence-Aurélie Théroux-Marcotte, a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Her highly acclaimed illustrations are inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and World War II-era posters. Sophie's award-winning work has also appeared in many international publications, including the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times and Nature, as well as in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Sophie lives in Montreal. sophiecasson.com