Miguel’s Brave Knight is picture book biography in verse by the National Young People’s Poet Laureate, Margarita Engle. It tells the story of Miguel Cervantes, the sixteenth century writer, famous for Don Quixote.

Any picture book biography, but especially one in verse, has to be particular about what story it tells. A picture book doesn’t give you the length to delve into every aspect of a subject’s life. You need to choose one theme to explore and explain and describe. Someone once described it to me as finding the single golden thread that will run through every page of your manuscript. The demands of poetry make it even more important that the focus is tight and well-defined.

Engle explores the relationship between imagination and bravery in her book. The book is written in the voice of Cervantes as a boy. We see him struggling with his family’s economically precarious situation. When his father is thrown in debtor’s prison, young Cervantes says:

They even took our beds and plates.

Where will we sleep?

How will we eat?

This scary situation–one that will be familiar to, sadly, many children–requires real bravery. Engle explores where Cervantes’ courage to continue comes:

Our empty house looks

so spooky

and stark…

But when I close my eyes,

the spark of a story flares up.

This book is set in the 1500s, but it is a sympathetic acknowledgment of the kinds of family, home, and political traumas children face. And it gives them a model, suffused with hope, for how to deal with those problems, for how to find their own inner bravery.

Miguel’s Brave Knight: Young Cervantes and His Dream of Don Quixote, by Margarita Engle, illustrated by Raul Colon. (Peachtree: 2018).

Alyson Beecher hosts the Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge at kidlitfrenzy.com. Visit there for more great nonfiction picture books!