By Margaret Wild
A one-eyed dog and a magpie who can't fly are everything to each other, until a restless, jealous fox turns up to break them apart.
Dog has one eye. Magpie's wing was burned so badly in a fire that she'll never fly again. Dog finds her, carries her home, and the two of them slowly put each other back together. Magpie rides on Dog's back while he tears through the bush at full speed, and for the length of that run she feels like she's flying again. They're happy. Then Fox comes out of the hot, flickering forest, restless and alone, and he watches them. He whispers something quiet and cruel to Magpie: Dog is slow, but I am fast, and if you ride with me you will really fly. She's tempted. She climbs onto his back, and he runs and runs, deep into the red desert, far from Dog. Then he stops, shakes her off, and leaves her there on purpose. Now, he says, you and Dog will both know what it is to be truly alone. Magpie, a speck in all that emptiness, turns back toward the smell of Dog and begins to walk.
It hands an older child a hard, honest feeling and doesn't soften it: that jealousy can talk you into betraying someone who loves you, and that being left alone is the cost. Ron Brooks's paintings do half the work here, raw and scratched, all reds and blacks, with words scrawled by hand and sometimes running sideways up the page, so the loneliness is something you can nearly feel while you read. The ending doesn't reassure you. Magpie has done a terrible thing, and she faces a long, uncertain walk back with no promise she makes it. The book just lets that sit, and some older children turn it over for a long time afterward.