Currently in Books: Children's Book offers springboard for discussion/h2>

Erica Block

Author Joan Dower Kosmachuk is executive director of a Christian agency that encourages pregnant women to carry unplanned pregnancies to term, opposes abortion and encourages adoption. As author of the children's novel Jenny's Secret, Kosmachuk conveys the same sentiments. Her challenge, however, is to avoid becoming too didactic, but still capture the reader's interest so the teaching is absorbed almost unconsciously. In directing her teaching at children, Kosmachuk has deliberately opted for an audience that is still formative and impressionable.

Kosmachuk comes very close to accomplishing her goal. I got somewhat caught up in the story of Jenny and Rebecca, the two friends who must both struggle with accepting loss. Rebecca's relationship with her pet dog and her difficult decision to relinquish it, runs parallel to the more profound, but somehow less emotionally gripping loss Jenny is being asked to accept. The author makes little attempt to interpret the loss that a parent feels in relinquishing a baby for adoption.

The author captures, perhaps inadvertently, something of the confusion of the world of the preteen, portraying girls who have boyfriends and alluding to the possibility of sexual relations, but otherwise describing them in childlike roles and character.

The author manages within the framework of a very short story to clearly describe the function of a pro-life counselling centre and to highlight all of its primary issues of concern. Jenny's Secret may have a limited readership because of its explicitly Christian allusions toward the end, however it offers young Christian readers an entertaining story and a springboard for discussion of some very pertinent themes.

Erica Block is a counsellor at Pregnancy Distress Service Inc., a non-profit social service agency in the core area of Winnipeg.

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