Love here is built on the deceptively simple belief that other beings in the world are fully our equals, sharing the same inherent worth, with as much right to life and joy - and with sorrow a certain outcome for us all. The all-encompassing power of love is a theme in DiCamillo’s work - from “Because of Winn-Dixie” to her two Newbery Medal winners, “The Tale of Despereaux” and “Flora and Ulysses” - as is the investment of animals and children with agency and personality. “The Beatryce Prophecy” never tells the lie that nothing bad can happen - death and tragedy get their due - but the story, as well as Sophie Blackall’s lustrous pencil illustrations, lingers in the bright places of work and discovery, illumination and beauty and, above all, love, which in these pages can fix all things, even the broken past, not by making them magically whole again but by existing and being true. For them, she is.īut while this novel is full of such ordinarily selfish and cruel people - which might explain Answelica’s mood - there are shining exceptions, and Beatryce, a young girl hunted by the king because of a prophecy that she will unseat him, becomes the needle and thread that pulls them together: from Brother Edik, the timid monk who finds her in the monastery barn covered in blood and dirt, to the orphan boy Jack Dory and the mysterious bearded man she meets in the woods, to her missing mother. It’s not surprising that the same monks who later deliberately wash their hands of the troublesome problem of Beatryce have failed that test, and fear her as a thing possessed by demons. Answelica, the savage goat of “The Beatryce Prophecy,” is far less good-humored than Mercy, the beaming pig, but then she lives in the harder (and in this case medieval) world of middle grade fiction, where a goat has to look out for herself and the wounded child in her care, and her best tool for judging the character of those around her is to test their reaction to being violently butted. I first met Kate DiCamillo in the pages of one of the Mercy Watson chapter books when it came home from the school library with my daughter many years ago.

THE BEATRYCE PROPHECY By Kate DiCamillo Illustrated by Sophie Blackall

Kate dicamillo the beatryce prophecy