Ingredients for a happy Saturday

My favourite way to begin the weekend: a cup of tea in bed with the Saturday Age. Extra sweet this morning to stumble across this lovely review:

"The angel in Sally Rippin's latest book is not the angel of current popular culture imaginings. While an entirely original creation, it's closer to David Almond's eerie 'Skellig' than to the mass-produced, cookie-cutter angels that are pouring out of so many mediocre writers. Rippin's angel is a mangy, feral being, wild and inarticulate, yet somehow beautiful.

Jelly has just moved with her mother, father and Nonna from the outer to the inner suburbs, into a new house that backs on to the Merri Creek in Melbourne's north. She's to start at a new high school in the new year and is on the cusp of great change. Christmas should be a respite, but when she and her cousins Gino and Pik find an injured angel in the creek and decide to rescue and heal it, the pace of change accelerates.

Nonna is taken to hospital, Jelly and Gino confront the local bullies, Jelly feels the butterflies of potential adolescent love, and all the while she is looking after this wild creature, thinking about what she wishes for.

Although the angel is fantasy, the novel is otherwise entirely realistic. Jelly is a finely portrayed pre-teen, and Rippin is equally adept at capturing subterranean emotion as she is at creating authentic family relationships and writing evocative descriptions of place.

This novel for children in the middle to upper years of primary school (older readers will appreciate it too) is anything but feral, mangy or inarticulate - it is as beautiful and mysteriously magical as the angel."

- Lorien Kaye, Saturday Age, March 5.