Jessica Vitalis Discusses The Wolf’s Curse

An interview with Jessica Vitalis brought to you by HarperCollins Children’s Books
The Children’s Book Review

In this episode, I talk with the debut author of The Wolf’s Curse, Jessica Vitalis.

Today we discuss The Wolf’s Curse, an adventure that tackles heavy themes like death, grief, tradition, and community while ultimately providing hope. Narrated in a voice reminiscent of The Book Thief, this fast-paced adventure is perfect for fans of fantasy such as The Girl Who Drank the Moon and A Wish in the Dark. We also talk about Jessica’s Cinderella story of becoming a published author. We finish with the first chapter from the audiobook version of The Wolf’s Curse for a special surprise. Join us!

“Curiosity from young readers about the topic of death—combined with the level of action that takes place—will suck readers into the pages of The Wolf’s Curse, spitting them out on the other side seeing human connections in a whole new way. Highly recommended.” — The Children’s Book Review

Listen to the Interview

Read the Interview

Bianca Schulze: I am so thrilled to get to talk to you about The Wolf’s Curse. The Growing Readers Podcast is relatively new, and so far, we have spoken with many picture book creators, so you’re the first middle-grade novelist that we get to talk to, and that’s kind of cool because The Wolf’s Curse is your debut book.

Jessica Vitalis: Fantastic. Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here breaking new ground with middle-grade readers.

Bianca Schulze: Exactly. So, The Wolf’s Curse is a fast-paced adventure, but it does tackle heavy themes like death and grief and traditions and mythology and community. So, will you talk us through the story without any spoilers, of course, and share your hopes for what readers will take away from reading your book?

Jessica Vitalis: Sure. The Wolf’s Curse is a twist on Grim Reaper mythology, so at the beginning of the story, we have a great white wolf searching for somebody to take her job. But the only person who can see her is a 12-year-old boy named Gauge. He has been ostracized and spent most of his life hiding because the local community thinks he’s a voyant or a kind of witch. But when he spots the great white wolf steal his grandpapa’s soul, he vows revenge. So, Gauge ends up joining forces with another orphan, and they embark on a life-changing journey that reveals surprising truths about the wolf but also about death.

This book, to me, encapsulates everything that I hope to do as a writer with children’s literature because I think my mission is really to write entertaining and thought-provoking stories. But I also want the children to have fun and enjoy reading and come out of it seeing the world in a new way. As you said, The Wolf’s Curse is a fast-paced fantasy, but it does tackle heavy themes, and ultimately, I hope it will give readers a sense of hope. And if they’ve encountered grief, a sense of healing.

Bianca Schulze: As I have read the book, it one hundred percent does that. I loved the themes woven throughout and enjoyed the ending, which I won’t talk about right now. But tell us more. Tell us more about the snarky wolf because the snarky wolf is the narrator of the story, and I feel like her voice is perfect for fans of Lemony Snicket. Tell us about the wolf.

Jessica Vitalis: Sure. To understand the wolf, we kind of must go back to the genesis of the story. So, I didn’t immediately want to write a story necessarily about death and grief. What happened with this story is that I was standing in front of my bookshelves searching for inspiration, trying to think about what kind of story I wanted to write next. And I pulled out a copy of The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, and that is a gorgeous story set in Nazi Germany, where a little girl is sent to live with a foster family. But the brilliance of that story is that it is narrated by death. So, at that precise moment, even though I had read that story many times before, something just clicked with me and I went, wow, that’s amazing. And how much fun would it be to write a story with death as a narrator? So that’s how I started the idea.

And then I started to think about, well, if I’m going to write a story with the Grim Reaper narrating, what is that going to look like? And I started to think about some of the tropes that we have associated with grim reapers. And typically, these dark hooded figures are carrying a knife, and they’re very frightening. And I wanted to twist that into something that was more accessible for middle-grade readers.

So, my first thought was that the Grim Reaper had to be a woman because that would be turning the trope on its head. And my second thought was that maybe it would be interesting for the Grim Reaper to be some type of animal. So initially, I thought perhaps a crow because I had just read something about crows, and they’re just such intelligent, interesting, clever animals. But that felt too easy because if you’re a reaper and you can just fly in and take a soul and fly away, that doesn’t present very many plot difficulties.

And a wolf was the next animal that came to mind. And as soon as the wolf entered my mind, I just knew that that was the correct answer for me and my story, and I almost immediately sat down and just started writing. I was just looking for, gosh, what kind of voice would this wolf who is death, who really doesn’t want to be doing her job, what sort of voice would she have? And what came out was the prologue of my story, which is almost identical to the prologue that ended up being published. And as soon as her voice came out, I was off and running, and truly, the wolf just kind of stole the story, and I just let her run free for the rest of the book.

Bianca Schulze: So I don’t know if you have a copy of your book right there with you, but if you do, would you mind reading the quote from the book? And I know you’ll know which one I’m talking about. It starts with, to be perfectly honest.

Jessica Vitalis: Yes. All right. Let me go ahead and put on my reading glasses.

To be perfectly honest. I’d rather you walk away now. Life is hard enough without adding death to the mix. Besides, your precious time is better spent doing something else. Wouldn’t you rather be fetching water? Hang in the wash picking lice from your hair? I see that you are not to be put off in that case. We need to get a few things straight. First, I’m not a beast, a monster, or the devil. I’m only a tired wolf in search of relief. Second, I exist in the shadowy space between this world and the next. I slip between the two, doing things, seeing things, knowing things you will likely deem unbelievable. Finally, you must understand that it’s not myself I’m trying to save, or at least not only myself.

Bianca Schulze: When I read that, I just I feel like the hairs stood up on my arms because it drew me in. And I feel like, well, especially like we said, fans of Lemony Snicket who are used to the narrator speaking directly to them. It does draw the reader in and make them feel like they’re part of the story. But as I’ve completed the book, that paragraph for me, I think is outstanding because you don’t know it yet, but it just gives you so much insight and understanding into the wolf. But I also feel like there are some dark scenes where things get a bit gritty. But having read that paragraph, you don’t feel fully afraid of the wolf. You’re not sure. And so, I just think it was a really, really clever paragraph. So, thank you for writing it.

Jessica Vitalis: Well, thank you so much for saying that. I’m just sitting here grinning. So, thank you.

Bianca Schulze: Yeah, you’re welcome.

OK, so we both share a love of children’s literature, and I think we can agree it allows us to explore those sort of universal topics in really unique ways. And as a parent, it can be an instinct to sort of try and shelter our kids from hard things. Can you share a little bit of why you feel it’s important to trust kids with being able to handle life’s tough truths like death and grief?

Jessica Vitalis: Sure. Well, as you said, we as parents and caregivers and educators want to shelter our children, but I know firsthand that childhood isn’t always easy. I had a difficult childhood. I moved a lot. It was often very lonely, and I experienced a lot of fear and a lot of hunger and many very difficult things. So, I want to write books that will help children explore this darkness in the world. And if they’re not experiencing it, it will hopefully help them build empathy and make them stronger and more ready to tackle the challenges when they come along.

It can also be a really powerful way to help children process their feelings and offer them hope for the future. But to me, the trick is doing it in a way that’s both honest and entertaining, or at least engaging. And I think that’s where fantasy books come in because you can kind of move away from the immediacy of death and grief. So, what you won’t find in The Wolf’s Curse is sort of people lining up for funerals and going through this traditional grief process. So, the fantasy elements make it really fun and hopefully captivating for the children, but still lets them get at those darker elements that they need to be able to process to go on to be healthy individuals and members of society.

Bianca Schulze: The Wolf’s Curse contains some unique mythology and rituals, and I think the way you built the world, it’s very visual to me. When I’m reading the descriptions, I can almost see it like a movie playing out. I’m curious what kind of research, if you did any research, what did that look like for you for researching death and mythology and rituals?

Jessica Vitalis: Yeah, the research for this story was really fun. So, when I say that I sat down and wrote out my story and let the wolf take over, that was actually the second time I wrote the story, because the first time I wrote the story, I sat down and just wrote it out. I sent it off to a reader, and she sent me notes back and said, you know, this story is fine, but it doesn’t actually tackle any themes and just feels kind of generic. So, I threw it out.

When I sat down to write this second first draft, one of the things that I knew that I had to do was find a unique setting because the first book was just written in this very generic quasi-European renaissance setting. And I had recently returned from France at that time, and I was kind of obsessed with all things French, and I had also spent time in Germany as an exchange student. I spent a year in a very small seaside fishing village on the northern coast, and I’d always wanted to set a story there. So, when I was sitting down to write this new draft, I thought, well, what if I just merge those two things and take my very small fishing village and set it in this sort of French-like country?

And then I started thinking about if we’re in this medieval sort of renaissance era, they don’t know a lot about technology, science, the sort of modern things that we take for granted. So, I started to imagine how they would think about death and grief? How would they use the world around them to build a system of making sense of death and grief in a way that made sense for them?

Now, before I really dove into that, I sat down at my computer and I just googled death and grief rituals around the world, and that took me down some really fun and interesting paths because I realized that cultures all around the world approach death and grief in very different ways. So, I didn’t want to use their specific rituals because I didn’t want to appropriate their cultures. But that just helped me even more, understand that I could really open my imagination and let the world dictate the terms.

So, for instance, the first thing I asked myself was what they would think about the stars in the sky? Since this is a fishing village, all of their lives and their economy revolve around fishing.

Sometimes, when you look up in the sky, it kind of looks like the ocean and or a sea. And sometimes, even when you’re on a lake, you can’t really tell the difference between where the lake ends and the sky begins. So, to me, they believe stars are actually lanterns lit by their loved ones as they travel up to the sea in the sky and sail into eternity.

So, using this setting to sort of dip deeper into the story’s themes really makes the world-building in this story so much fun. So again, moving away from traditional grief mythology, wherein our society has funerals and caskets. We have things of that nature in The Wolf’s Curse; they have a release ceremony that involves breaking a mirror over the deceased loved one’s face so that their souls can be released. They don’t have cemeteries. Their loved ones are buried at a place they call the wharves. And instead of being buried in caskets, they are placed in vessels which are boats that they believe will fly up to the sea in the sky.

Bianca Schulze: It’s honestly so fascinating, and I had figured from reading that you had done quite a bit of research.

Ultimately, I feel like what I took away as something sort of deep-seated for me is that your book gives the message that everybody does grieve differently, but that ultimately there is a comfort in believing in something happening to a person’s soul. No matter what religion or no religion at all that anybody believes that may influence how a person processes grief, I feel like your story embraces just somehow magically, like all of that, no matter what you believe. It just shows you that it doesn’t matter how you grieve or the process you go through when someone’s grieving, but that ultimately there is a comfort in believing in something and that you will meet your lost souls from family members sometime one day again.

Anyway, that was it for me, and I know the reading experience is so personal and everybody will take something slightly different away from it. But for me, I just loved that comfort in knowing that just believing in something will bring you peace.

Jessica Vitalis: I’m so happy that was your takeaway because I was so cognizant of that as I was writing and really trying to hold the truth that there are so many different beliefs and the readers reading my book aren’t all going to believe the same thing. And so, I really wanted to be respectful of that and not try to force sort of my vision or any set of spiritual beliefs or religions into this story, but rather just communicate that what we as a society are telling children about death with these grim Reaper mythologies, I don’t believe it’s true. It doesn’t have to be something dark and scary, and death in grief can be something more hopeful and that there’s really room for healing and that there’s room for hope. That’s the message I hope readers will take away from this story.

Bianca Schulze: So, since The Wolf’s Curse is your debut novel, we need to talk about your path to publishing. I’d love to hear everything between rejection letters and wait for this—I want to add a drumroll here [drum roll]—to a six-figure deal. Amazing. All right. Tell us about it.

Jessica Vitalis: Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much. First, it has been quite a journey. I actually started writing 14 years ago. It took me 13 years to get my first book deal. Initially, I started writing a memoir and some picture books because I had young children at the time, and I was in love with picture books. And so, I thought that I was going to be a picture book author. But every single time I brought my picture books to this critique group that I had joined to get feedback, they kept telling me, well, that sounds like the first chapter in a middle-grade novel.

So, at that point, I thought, OK, well, I haven’t read middle-grade novels in decades. I’m going to go ahead and see what this is all about. I’m going to go back to the middle-grade novels that I loved as a child and start reading, and I came across a middle-grade novel called Kit’s Wilderness by David Almond. And as soon as I read that novel, it was just like I had found home, and I knew immediately that middle grade was going to be my sweet spot.

At that point, I had already finished a memoir and I queried it a whole bunch. I got so many agents interested in that memoir. My acceptance rate was like 50 or 60 percent, which if you’re out there and you’re a writer, you know that that’s an extremely high level of interest. So, I thought, OK, this is it for me. I’m going to get an agent; I’m going to publish this memoir. I’m going to be an author. But not only did every single agent who read the story pass, one agent emailed me to tell me how excited he had been about the concept and how disappointed he had been in the execution. In not so many words, he basically said to me that I had no idea what I was doing, that I didn’t know how to write scenes, I didn’t know how to write sentences, and just had completely wasted his time. It was quite a shock.

But you know, I’m not the type of person that takes that type of rejection personally. I was obviously very upset and sad, but I looked at what he was telling me, and I took a look at my writing, and I was like, well, you know, he’s probably right. So, at that point, I embarked on this journey to educate myself because I had always been a good writer in the sense that I had won awards for writing, and I had taken a lot of writing classes in college. But I had never written a novel, and that’s a completely different beast. So, I decided to educate myself, and I started by reading every Newbery winner and honor winner for the last 20 or 30 years, and I kept writing. I kept studying the craft, taught myself how to write scenes, and taught myself how to write sentences and captivate the reader.

I wrote a second middle-grade novel, and I wrote a third middle-grade novel. And at that point, I got an agent. So once again, I was at this point where I thought I’ve put in the work. I know what I’m doing. This is it. This is going to be my first published book, but that book didn’t sell, and my fourth book didn’t sell, and my fifth book didn’t sell.

And meanwhile, the years have passed, and after 13 years, I started on my sixth book. I had a heart-to-heart with my agent, and we both agreed that we had been together at that point for maybe six or seven years, and I adored my first agent and still adore my first agent. But we mutually decided, for whatever reason, things don’t seem to be working. Let’s part ways. I’m going to take my sixth book and just try for a fresh start and see what the universe throws at me. So, I did that in January of 2020. I parted ways with my agent, which is frightening because I had no guarantees, of course, that I would even get another agent’s interest.

But something else happened along the way. So, I was by that point mentoring a contest where people can submit their stories—they will be, if they’re chosen, they’ll be mentored by an agented or published author. And I had been doing that for several years, and there was another author named Erin Entrada Kelly, who is a brilliant Newbery Medal-winning author. She also mentored Pitch Wars that year, and she had, behind the scenes, put out something on one of our chat groups that said, I’m teaching this class at UCLA, and I need some manuscripts to go over with my students. I’ll give my feedback if anybody is interested.

Well, I was just getting ready to start querying this fresh sixth manuscript that nobody had seen yet. So, I immediately shot her over my manuscript and said, I would love your feedback. Let me know what you think, and I didn’t hear from her for a few weeks. And then, out of the blue one night, it was a Saturday evening. I got a message from her on Facebook, and it just said, I’m teaching this class tomorrow. And just so you know, I am obsessed with this story.

That, for me, was just such an exciting moment that I felt like, OK, maybe I haven’t made this huge mistake leaving my agent. Maybe this story has some legs. Maybe it’s going to go somewhere, but I didn’t really want to get my hopes up, so I emailed her back and said, thank you, I’m looking for a new agent, and so I really appreciate the kind words. And she got back to me right away and said, oh, well, send me the story, I’ll look. And if it’s appropriate, I’ll send it off to my agent.

So, at that point, I was still really working hard to keep my cool, even though I really wasn’t very cool at all. And. I sent it off to her, but because of 13 years of literally hundreds of rejections, I did not have any real hope that Erin Entrada Kelly would read and love my entire book, that she would actually pass it on to her agent, who is the Sarah Crowe, one of the top agents in the industry, and that Sarah would read it and love it and offer representation. Like to me, that just seems like pie in the sky. All of the stars would have to line up in such an amazing way.

So, I sent it off to her and thought, I’m just going to forget about this. I’m going to go about getting my queries out there and see what happens. What actually happened was that less than 24 hours after I sent my book off to Erin, I woke up the next morning with an email in my inbox from Erin saying, I sent this off to Sarah, and she loves it, she wants to set up a call. So, I had an offer of representation. I like to call Erin my literary godmother because who knows how my journey might have unfolded without her. But I just feel so lucky that the stars did line up in exactly the right way for me after all those years.

Bianca Schulze: I just have to say that is so amazing, but I think it’s also important to know that you put in so much hard work leading up to that. So yes, the stars aligned, but they aligned because of all your hard work and your tenacity and your persistence and your drive not to give up.

Jessica Vitalis: I love that you mentioned that because so often we all look at people and we think, oh, that person made it. That person has this overnight success, and as a society, we’re sort of obsessed with that idea of overnight success. And if you look at my story on the surface, it seems like I had that overnight success. I got this big book deal overnight. But you’re right, it was the culmination of literally 13 years of non-stop hard work and six manuscripts and lots and lots and lots of work on improving my craft and trying to earn it and write a story that was worthy of that kind of attention.

So, it’s both. It’s this industry, I think, is a little bit of luck and just a whole lot of hard work.

Bianca Schulze: Absolutely. I completely agree. OK, so Erin Entrada Kelly connects you with her agent. Her agent signs you. So, let’s hear about getting that actual book deal.

Jessica Vitalis: Sure. So, once I signed with Sarah, she had given me a few notes during the call where she made the offer. So, I made some of the minor revisions that I knew she wanted. She gave me a few more notes. I think we did two very small minor passes where we were just finishing fixing little things. And then it was the end of, well, I’m going to get the timing wrong, but basically very shortly after that.

So, about a month after I signed with her, we went out on submission. Again, I had been on submission for literally years at that point, and I knew that we would not hear anything for months and months and months. So, I really put it out of my mind, and I turned to the next story and just expected not to hear anything. About a week later, I got an email from Sarah that said, we have this interest from this editor, and I’m just wondering, or she would like to know if you’re working on anything else.

I had just a couple of short paragraphs, summaries of other stories that I was working on. So, I sent that to Sarah, and she sent it off to the editor and I thought, well, that’s really exciting. But I’ve been here before, and you know, unless they take it to acquisitions, nothing’s going to happen. So again, put it out of my mind; I didn’t expect to hear anything for months and months. And then, a week later, I was sitting at my desk working on the next thing and an email popped up on my screen that said an offer. And I started screaming.

I opened my email. It was a note from Sarah saying, do you have time to talk? And then she had just forwarded the offer from Greenwillow HarperCollins, and I immediately started ugly crying. I was screaming. My older daughter happened to be walking by my office and she ran inside. She saw what was happening. So, she immediately started filming. Me and my other daughter came running in, and the three of us were just jumping around like mad women. And at that point, I hadn’t even read the email. I knew I had an offer, but I didn’t know anything.

So, I tried to compose myself. I sat down and started reading, and I saw that it was from Greenwillow, which is just one of the most magical imprints in the whole world. Since the beginning of my journey, I would go into bookstores, and I would hold Greenwillow books and just admire how beautiful they are and think of how magical it would be to be a Greenwillow author. So, I was just flabbergasted that my offer was from Greenwillow.

And then I kept reading and I saw that it was a two-book deal—which to me like the fact that they were going to buy a second book based on nothing more than a couple of sentences I had written. And then, of course, I saw that it was an enormous offer that was just absolutely magical. So, I shot Sarah back an email and said, I’d love to talk, but I need to finish ugly crying first, so I’ll call you in a few minutes.

Bianca Schulze: Well, that is so amazing.

Jessica Vitalis: It was a really special moment to have my girls there.

Bianca Schulze: I almost feel like if you get your first book deal and you don’t ugly cry, then how did you get your book deal? I don’t know. Like, it’s the rite of passage. You have to ugly cry when you get your first book deal.

Jessica Vitalis: I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure it’s a lie. Yeah.

Speaker2: You have a program that’s called Magic in the Middle. Will you tell me what that is?

Jessica Vitalis: Magic in the Middle is a series of free monthly recorded book talks listeners can find on YouTube. Or you can go to my website at https://jessicavitalis.com/magic-in-the-middle/  and sign up to receive them in your inbox each month.

Magic in the Middle is a way for teachers, educators, and parents to introduce their children to new fantasy stories. Because there are so many books coming out all the time, I think it can feel really overwhelming to figure out what should kids be reading and how do we introduce them to new areas that are out there that they might like that aren’t the big stories that are always getting the big, splashy attention. And because I read so much, I wanted to be able to do something to use that knowledge in a way that would help other people. So, I pick one book each month and I just record a book talk about it. I tell readers why I think they will love it, and I hope that people are using that to introduce stories to kids.

Bianca Schulze: Yeah. See, so you’re just ringing true to the saying, and I say it in every podcast, but to be a writer, they say, you need to be a reader first, and you’re proving that you obviously read a lot and you’re reading in the genre that you’re writing. Thank you for demonstrating that. But was there a pivotal moment in which you remember thinking of yourself as a reader?

Jessica Vitalis: I have always been a reader. I have a picture of me as a very young toddler. Maybe a year or two years old, I must have been sick. I’m lying on the couch and I’m holding a book. But my first memory of being a reader is I was four or five years old, and I remember waiting for the mail to come because my mother had enrolled me in this book a month club. I’m not sure if it was little golden stories or what it was, but I remember this first memory. I remember getting There’s a Monster At the End of This Book in the mail, and just that sense of this is the most amazing thing in the entire world.

I think that for me, just my entire life, I’ve had this sense that I was a reader, but then something else happened. I had a very transient childhood. I moved a lot and in one of the schools that I was in (maybe second grade), one of the things the teachers did as soon as I got there was to set me down in front of a screen. They scrolled a story, a written story down the screen, and when I was done reading that story, they had me take a comprehension test. And I took the comprehension test and they said, OK, well, that was fine. Now we’re going to do it faster. I read it faster. And this went on and on and on until the words were blurring across the screen. And I was still reading it and taking the test and comprehending it. And I just remember all the teachers gathering around me.

As a very young child who didn’t have a lot of necessarily positive affirmations in my life, there was just this sense of, wow, this is something that I’m really, really good at.

Bianca Schulze: This community does, but just in general, I feel like people just don’t really give credit to the power that reading can have for a child and allowing them the opportunity to explore so many different worlds, whether they’re real worlds or made-up fantasy worlds, but offering kids an escape or offering them real nonfiction information. I just love that reading was that for you and that it empowered you. And I hope all the parents out there are just feeding their kids with so many books.

Jessica Vitalis: I was just going to say, it’s funny that you say that because I had a photographer here for a photo shoot for a magazine this morning. We were chatting about books, and he told me: I have a new grandbaby and I can’t wait until she’s old enough for me to read to her. And my response was, oh my goodness; you can start reading to her right now. Like she’s only two weeks old now, but if you start reading stories now, she’ll get used to that, the flow, and the musicality of being read to, and she’ll grow up with this love of books. Please, parents, don’t wait! From the minute your child is born, start reading them stories so that it’s part of the fabric of who they are.

Bianca Schulze: Yes. Oh my gosh, I love that you said that so perfectly.

All right. Well, I have a special treat for our listeners. I have the whole first chapter from the audiobook that I get to share with the listeners. Jessica, you and I will just disappear off into the air and everybody is going to be left with your first chapter of The Wolf’s Curse.

Jessica Vitalis: Well, I have to say, first of all, that is a surprise to me too. I have not heard my audiobook or the first chapter, so I am bouncing on my seat right now and so excited. I can’t even tell you. Wow, this is amazing.

Bianca Schulze: Well, thank you again, everybody. Honestly, we must thank Jessica for trusting that our children can handle such topics of The Wolf’s Curse because it’s such a magical, beautiful book that really is quite hopeful. So, thank you, Jessica.

Jessica Vitalis: Thank you so much for having me.

The transcription of this interview with Jessica Vitalis has been condensed and edited for readability.

About the Book

Publisher’s Synopsis: Twelve-year-old Gauge’s life has been cursed since the day he witnessed an invisible Great White Wolf steal his grandpapá’s soul, preventing it from reaching the Sea-in-the-Sky and sailing into eternity. When the superstitious residents of Bouge-by-the-Sea accuse the boy of crying wolf, he joins forces with another orphan to prove his innocence. They navigate their shared grief in a journey that ultimately reveals life-changing truths about the wolf—and death. Narrated in a voice reminiscent of The Book Thief, this fast-paced adventure is perfect for fans of fantasy such as The Girl Who Drank the Moon and A Wish in the Dark.

Buy the Book

Thank you for listening to the Growing Readers Podcast episode: Jessica Vitalis Discusses The Wolf’s Curse. For the latest episodes from The Growing Readers Podcast, Follow Now on Spotify. For similar books and articles, you can check out all of our content tagged with Books About Grief, Jessica Vitalis, Loss of a Grandparent, Middle Grade Books, and Wolf Books.