Lauren Mills

Vegetarian Baby and Child, Nov-Dec, 2002 by Gina Cassidy

It is difficult to write about Lauren Mills' work. Every time I sit down to my stack of books, I find one of my children has crept away with another of her captivating works and is happily entranced on the couch or in a corner.

Much of Lauren Mills' work vibrates with the values that vegetarians hold dear. Compassion, non-violence, responsibility, tolerance and respect for others who are different, are all held in high estimation.

Three books in particular are excellent, vegetarian-friendly stories exceptional quality: Fairy Wings, Fia and the Imp, and The Goblin Baby. You will want to read these stories aloud; they beg to be shared. The charm of these three books begins with the first pages, containing maps, in the case of the Fia books, and a cast of characters, in the case of The Goblin Baby. Using these, Mills prepares the reader to enter the magical world of her imagination.

The first book I ever read by Lauren Mills--co-illustrated with her husband, Dennis Nolan--is a beautiful piece of work. Fairy Wings (Little, Brown and Company, 1995) is simply a masterpiece: riveting storytelling, a central riddle to solve, and a satisfying conclusion; all the pieces fit. Little Fia, the only fairy born without wings, is happy to play with her outcast friends, Rat, Crow, and Frog, much to the disgust of her proper sisters. Her kind heart endears her to the reviled woodkins and to the boy fairy who joins in her water game of paddling the elder-berry. Fia has to make the choices of whether and how to save the rest of the fairies when a troll captures them. The illustrations for this book are works of art and won the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Golden Kite award for excellence in 1995 The writing should have won an award, too. I liked this book so much that I nearly named my youngest daughter for the wonderful protagonist.

The sequel to Fairy Wings is Fia and the Imp (Little, Brown and Company, 2002), co-credited with Dennis Nolan. Fia and the Imp is a clever, well-written story emphasizing forgiveness and charity. It teaches that one creature's gain could well be another's loss (a central tenet of compassionate vegetarianism). We catch up with the fairies planning Fia's engagement party. Not having learned her lesson about snobbery, Fia's sister Violet is determined to keep the wrong sort of creatures away from the affair. Moreover, Violet is contemptuous of the needy Woodkins who ask for her help. Fia risks her life to save two Woodkin children, and has a dream (or experience) that tests her. The illustrations in this book, too, are beautiful, but did not have quite the stunning effect on me as the first. I was a bit disappointed that Fia became beautiful in the sequel. The original Fia was brave, compassionate, forgiving and loyal, but not beautiful. With all the stories of beautiful girls marrying princes, my daughters woul d benefit from more normal-looking heroines. Still, this is a lovely book and I highly recommend it.

The Goblin Baby (Dial Books for Young Readers, 1999), which Lauren Mills wrote solo, is a wonderful, imaginative story of a young girl's magical adventure to acceptance of her new brother. The heroine, Amanda, shares her garden with a rabbit named Miss Lucy Larkin, a neighbor's dog, Turnip, and some gnomes who hold important secrets. The illustrations are superb. The story takes Amanda's version of events quite seriously, while giving the adult reader some food for thought.

The characters in these three books drink mint leaf tea and eat acorns and honey-filled raspberries--they do not eat animals or use them slavishly. Mistreatment specie's another is morally wrong in this universe.

A fourth vegetarian-friendly book by Mills is not about fairies or gnomes, but About a girl growing up in a poor mining community in Appalachia. In The Rag Coat (Little, Brown and Company, 1991), 8-year-old Minna feels privileged to receive a gift of a coat made from fabric scraps by neighbor women at their quilting get-togethers. Lining the coat is a feed-sack her late father used to keep her warm in winter. Minna is able to attend school because she has this wonderful new coat, but she is crushed when the other children make fun of it. Instead of responding in kind, Minna, after thinking things over, tells the other children that the rags that make up the coat tell the stories of their lives. It is a touching, deliberately gentle story.

Mills has illustrated an alphabet book called Elfabet, by Jane Yolen (Little, Brown and Company, 1990), that very young vegetarian children might delight in. The familiar little people, with acorn and flower hats and surrounded by other creatures, engage in various acrobatic poses within flower-bordered pages. There are no references to eating or exploiting animals. Even the ravenous "Egg Elf" uses an eggshell simply as a bowl for his berries.

Lauren Mills edits and illustrates a volume of poetry and stories of fairies called The Book of Little Folk: Faery Stories and Poems from Around the World (Dial Books, 1997). Included in this collection are Rose Fyleman's notable poem, "A Fairy Went A' Marketing" which my then 4-year old daughter loved so much that she memorized it and chose to recite it at a poetry reading. Australian poet, Mary Gilmore's "The Fairy Man" tells of making a cake of rainbows: "The stars he caught for raisins/The sun for candied peel/The moon he broke for spices/And ground it on the wheel." Mills retells tales from the Mayan, Ojibwa and Hawaiian peoples, and gives us tales from Swaziland, Sweden and India. She also recounts familiar stories like Hans Christian Andersen's Thumbelina, and The Elves and the Shoemaker from Germany. The poems are vegetarian-friendly, but, as you may have guessed, some of the fairy tales are not.