A Wizard in Love (Hardcover)

Kids are often thought to be better than adults at dealing with grief, but that doesn’t mean it’s ever easy. Two works by celebrated Montreal author and illustrator Mireille Levert explore the cycle of loss and recovery, and each, in its own way, offers a satisfying catharsis. In Tulip and Lupin Forever, grief is linked to the natural cycles of death and rebirth. Tulip, a watering fairy, is a delightfully ordinary looking girl with a tulip-shaped skirt and rosy cheeks, who happens to have a red watering can on her head. Her best friend Lupin is an equally charming creature called a “dog bee” – a kind of striped dachshund with wings, whose job is to suck nectar from flowers they visit. But one day, “after a thousand and a thousand more days together,” Lupin dies. A heartbroken Tulip cries watering cans full of tears. After a period of mourning, she decides she needs a change of scenery, and so sets off down the river to the sea. En route, she makes a new friend, and begins to recover her old joie de vivre. The rebirth she experiences when she arrives back home is deeply satisfying, both to Tulip and to readers, who may ask themselves at what point in this simple story they started to care so much about this unlikely creature. Levert provides both the text and the art, which work marvellously together. Crisp white backgrounds highlight the rich reds and greens of giant flowers – all of them tulips, of course. A Wizard in Love describes a similar process of reawakening. This time, however, the protagonist is unwilling to take those first steps back out into the world. Hector, a retired wizard, lives as a recluse in a rundown house with his cat, Poison. We never learn why he is so withdrawn, but Levert hints at a lost love that stopped the clocks, à la Miss Havisham. Hector’s contented but tightly circumscribed existence is interrupted by the arrival of a new neighbour. Before he knows it, strange (and therefore unpleasant) sounds are issuing from the rejuvenated house next door. When Hector peers through the window he sees “a beautiful woman with a lovely smile, singing as she played the piano.” Hector’s reaction is to bake “an evil cake” for the new arrival, Isabel. (When Poison nibbles on the cake, he is transformed into a fire-breathing dragon-cat.) But the meeting with Isabel does not go as planned. Instead of Hector changing the lovely lady into a dragon, it is he himself who is transformed. And the agent of the transformation is not magic spells, but music, flowers, and plain old ordinary love. As in Tulip and Lupin Forever, Levert’s text is sweet but never cloying, and doesn’t speak down to the reader. The artwork, by Marie Lafrance, has a similar tone. Hector has none of the visual charm of Tulip or Lupin. He is presented as a lumpy, grey, unsympathetic character, with pointy cat-like ears. The backgrounds are generally plain, and a depressed air hangs over the spreads. (Of course, this changes after Hector’s encounter with Isabel, and charmingly so.) Though Tulip is the superior book overall, both stories lift the reader up and provide those low to the ground with a broader perspective – one that shows there is always a new day coming, and that loss, while overwhelming in the moment, is not the final act.

Praise for The Princess Who Had Almost Everything:
“. . . a refreshingly bold modern day approach to storytelling [which] maintains much of the charm of traditional fairy tales.” — Highly Recommended, CM Magazine