MOTHER TERESA

From the kneeling supplicant on the front cover, surrounded by apostolic figures within an ornate cross, to the author’s Papal blessing on the back, this is the most pious yet of Demi’s profiles of our greatest spiritual touchstones. In a text that mixes specific biographical details with poems, prayers, and biblical passages, she follows Mother Teresa from childhood in what was then Yugoslavia to the inner call that sent her into a religious order in India. (She took her name from St. Teresa of Lisieux, “about whom it was said she did no great things—only small things with great love.”) Then the “call within a call” turned her from teaching to working with and for the poorest for the rest of her life. Demi caps her work with a long list of Mother Teresa’s international honors and a précis of current efforts to secure her sainthood that are likely to lose younger readers. And she illustrates with golden-framed art that, for all its characteristic grandeur and delicacy, fails to capture the squalor of the slums in which she worked, or to give immediacy to her day to day contact with the diseased and desperate. But her faith, her message, and the force of her personality come through with superb clarity. (bibliography, map) (Picture book/biography. 9-12)