Canadian author Jean Little wrote over 50 books, mostly for and about children. Many of them featured children who were newcomers to Canada, orphans or in other difficult circumstances. The books all have positive outcomes, often through discovery or rediscovery of the value of family.

She was born in 1932, the daughter of medical missionaries in Taiwan, and died April 6 of this year in Guelph, Ontario at the age of 88.

Almost all her books have a Canadian setting. Her last book, Hand in Hand, illustrated above, is set in the USA and is about the childhood of Helen Keller. It was published in 2016. The photo is obviously of a library copy and will have to go back to the library, whenever it opens again.

The book is fiction, but almost all the people and many of the events in the book are real. The subtitle, partly covered above, says, The real-life story of Helen Keller and Martha Washington. Helen Keller mentions Martha in her autobiography, The Story of My Life, written when she was 21. Martha was the young daughter of the Keller family’s cook and Helen’s only playmate.

All the servants of the Keller family were black. This was after the days of slavery, but conditions for black people in Alabama were not vastly improved. Yet Martha Washington learned to understand Helen Keller’s wishes and signs and played a role in her early years.

Based on the facts available, Jean Little has written a believable story of how it might have been, from the viewpoint of Martha Washington. The book ends at the point when Helen finally grasps that the lines Annie Sullivan is making with her finger on Helen’s palm form the word for the water that is pouring over her hand.

Jean Little herself was blind all her life. Her recounting of interactions between sighted people and a little blind (and deaf) girl have an authenticity that grasps and holds the reader’s attention. The book is written for younger readers, but this old guy found it a fascinating read.

–Hand in Hand, The real-life story of Helen Keller and Martha Washington. © 2016 by Jean Little, published by Scholastic Canada