A Raven Named Grip: How a Bird Inspired Two Famous Writers, Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe

This breezy animal biography opens in the British household of the writer Charles Dickens, whose raven Grip teases his children, chasing them around the house. Singer deftly contextualizes Dickens’s literary fame and his typically Victorian taste in pets. Dickens casts Grip as a character in a novel, and while in the U.S. on a lecture tour, an aspiring interviewer named Edgar Allan Poe is so taken with the fictional raven—and a painted image of Grip—that he eventually writes a poem of his own about a raven. Stylized digital spreads by Fotheringham read like a series of animation cells, with a nod to period costumes and details. The most memorable images represent the raven as an enormous bird with the small figures of Dickens and Poe on its back, a symbol of its function as muse and inspiration. Back matter supplies more information about these intelligent animals, as well as a selected bibliography. Ages 6–8. (Dec.)