| From
the January/February 2007 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Author Faith McNulty died in 2005. Her niece,
Katherine Keiffer,
accepted the award on her behalf and spoke briefly about her aunt.
Boston Globe–Horn
Book Award Acceptance
By Katherine Keiffer
CAN’T TELL YOU how much Faith would have enjoyed receiving
this award. She was immensely proud of her work, and particularly
of her children’s books. Faith died about a year and a half
ago, and though she was bedridden for the last months of her life,
she had a terrific run, still riding horseback, hiking steep trails
to swim in her favorite pond, writing, and wheeling-and-dealing
in real estate, pretty much right to the end.
Faith’s consuming interest in wildlife began
when she was very young. Whether this sprang from her father assuring
her that my infant mother was merely a large beetle and nothing
to worry about, or from some other cause, she was fascinated by
creatures of all kinds. She happily hid a dead snake in my mother’s
bed when they were little girls and was known for her reckless horseback
riding. She grew to be a fearless woman. In fact, we dubbed her
the Iron Mouse, since her small stature and delicate good looks
concealed an unexpectedly ferocious will.
Most of Faith’s stories were about animals
and their sensibilities; how they relate to us, and we to them.
She was forever rescuing wild animals washed up on her kitchen step
after a storm: mice, woodchucks, birds, snakes — they all
provided subjects for her stories. Chuckie, an orphaned woodchuck
she found and raised, became the central character in one of her
children’s books. Faith set him free once he was old enough
to fend for himself, and he lived in a stone wall near her house.
She could call him by name and he would come bounding out, put his
paws up on her knee, and let us pet him. Hard to believe of an overgrown
and unprepossessing rodent, but totally true.
If You Decide to Go to the Moon reflects
a sense of our place in the universe, the vastness of our planet
and solar system, how easily we can be overwhelmed by those distances,
how important it is to remember where we came from and why we travel.
Enhanced by the brilliant illustrations of Steven Kellogg, If
You Decide to Go to the Moon is one of her most successful
titles ever. But all of her stories, whether about animals, family,
our planet, or our universe, underscore our deep connection to those
other precious entities that make up our world, without preaching,
without condescension, and without pretense.
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