Review: A Gift of Her Own
A Gift of Her Own by Wendy Pini, Father Tree Press, 1995.
What do you do when someone laughs at something that’s close to your heart, until you think your heart will break? Run away from home, into the forest, to live on wild berries for the rest of your life?
That is what young Elmy tries to do in A Gift of Her Own, a fantasy picture book from the creators of the Elfquest graphic novels. Illustrated with Wendy Pini’s achingly beautiful artwork, the story carries an important message for young children with creative souls.
Elmy is a poor child in an alternate world, the World of Two Moons. When she is mocked for a button necklace that she made for herself, she flees into the forest, vowing never to return. There she meets some mysterious people — the wolfriding elves that she believed were only legend. The gentle treeshaper, Redlance, takes her deep into the elfin holt, where she meets two youngsters, Ember and Suntop. Elmy soon finds the values of her human world turned around, for the elves trade furs and meat with the trolls for gold and jewels that they view as mere decoration, while Elmy’s handmade necklace is treated with respect. “Elmy made that!” Ember says, holding back the greedy troll child, Trinket, who makes a grab for the necklace. “It’s special!”
“You are a Maker,” Redlance tells her. “With such a gift, you’ll never want for anything. Someone will always have a use for what you can do. There aren’t many Makers, after all.”
In the 1980’s, Wendy and Richard Pini published the first of their fantasy graphic novels that becaome the Elfquest series. “Fantasy with teeth,” they called it, for the Wolfriders weren’t the sort of elves to just drift around the forest looking ethereal. The ancestors of the wolfriders were forced to live in a savage world, and adapted by becoming creatures of the night, bonding with wolves and learning to hunt as the wolves do. The novels live on, supported by a fan base playing out their out their own Wolfrider fantasies in online holts all across the Internet. While the original Elfquest novels deal with adult subjects, A Gift of Her Own brings the world of the Wolfriders to children in this gentle and lovely picture book.
