By Poems by Matthea Harvey, Paintings by Amy Jean Porter
116 pages; McSweeny's

Matthea Harvey's adaptive retelling of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" began as an experiment in erasures—a method of creating a poem from an established piece of text by omitting words or phrases. Harvey worked with the biography A Portrait of Charles Lamb by David Cecil. She used Wite-Out to erase Cecil's text from the page, leaving behind a few sparse words that eventually became an irreverent take on the nursery rhyme. What emerges is a touching new tale about a lonely lamb who "lives in the background" and Mary, who is "as pretty as a poem." The two become close and lead each other on fanciful adventures. Harvey has paired her words with illustrations by Amy Jean Porter, whose drawings are full of color and give you insight into the lamb's innermost thoughts (for example, we see him daydreaming about being a baseball player). The result is not a story about a girl and her lamb; it's a query into the need for companionship and for someone to understand us.

— Abbe Wright