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Looking for Angels
By Valiska Gregory
Illustrated by Leslie Baker
The Story
“Remember,” says Sarah’s grandpa, “tomorrow we’ll be looking for angels.” Sarah knows what angels look like—plump cherub angels with golden trumpets, angels made of stone, and angels with wings white as moths. And she’s pretty sure that you can’t really see an angel, not on “an ordinary day, plain as a brown sparrow.” But when her grandfather points out a few of the things she’s been missing—the sun on the patchwork quilt, the jewel-like glow of ripe raspberries in the garden—she finds that angels are not so uncommon after all.
Valiska Gregory’s poetic text and Leslie Baker’s exquisite watercolors give glowing life to this story about the search for “everyday angels,” the unnoticed beauty all around us.
Leslie Baker is an accomplished artist whose luminous watercolors illustrated The Third Story Cat which won the International Reading Association's Children's Book Award.
The Story Behind the Story
When I was in college, I read Henry James The Art of Fiction for the first time. In the essay, James gives advice to someone who wants to be a writer and says, “Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost.” I realized that my father gave me the very same advice, only he didn’t say it so fancy. “Don’t miss a trick,” he would advise me, and it was excellent advice for someone who was going to grow up and be a writer. I didn’t realize until I was literally holding a copy of the book in my hands, that it was a tribute to my father who would wake us up in the middle of the night just to make sure we didn’t miss an eclipse of the moon.
