Jasmine Green Rescues

Life on the farm with an animal-loving kid

Hello hello,

I’m a couple of days late on this one, but late felt better than just punting to next week. Let’s take a look at,

The Series: Jasmine Green Rescues
The Author: Helen Peters
The Illustrator: Ellie Snowdon
Length/Picture Density: 140ish pages, pictures every two or three pages

There’s an idealized form of rustic life that shows up in a lot of kid’s literature. We’ve had at least a couple of picture books that I like a lot except that the overall message is that cities are dirty and inconsiderate places but life is nice in the country (nothing against country life, I just don’t like it when people hate on cities).

My exposure to the Jasmine Green Rescues books is limited, but from what I’ve read they bring out what people love about rural life without idealizing it or casting it in contrast to urban living.

The titular character is the daughter of an Indian American (as in, their ancestors were from India) family that owns a farm. Her mom is a veterinarian and her dad is a farmer. Jasmine aspires to run an animal rescue center when she’s older, so she’s constantly on the lookout for animals in need.

In each story, she finds a young creature in need — the books tend to create urgency by making it so the animal won’t survive without human intervention. This can involve disobeying her parents to start taking care of the animal. They’re not heartless — far from it — but in their lines of work they know that they can’t save every animal, and often there are complications they would rather not deal with in, say, raising a duck from a hatchling on up.

The books don’t make you deal with too much animal death, but there is some implied, and death isn’t treated as taboo. For instance, the first book has a side detail thrown into a scene about how mother pigs sometimes eat their piglets. It’s not a detail you need to know to understand the scene and it’s certainly not important to the action, but it’s the sort of thing that comes up in farm life. The farm details add a lot of richness to the books, even if they’re occasionally grisly.

The family also has a refreshing realism to them. Her parents are authoritative and loving, and handle Jasmine in a way that impacts the plot but isn’t controlled by it. They’re realistically drawn parents of an impressive kid who wants to adopt all the animals. Her older brother is energetic but not a maniac. Jasmine is loving and determined, but not saccharine or foolish.

Once the plot is established, we get a story arc involving the trials and joys of working with a young animal, building up to a big dramatic scene at the end and Jasmine proving that she can handle a serious responsibility. In the middle, there are a lot of adorable scenes involving Jasmine, often with a friend, playing with animals and hanging out on the farm.

The tension in the stories tend to involve an animal’s training or development in some way, so the interactions she has with the animal tend to have some stakes to them.

These books require some amount of patience, but they’re very rewarding and great for animal lovers, as long as those animal lovers can handle the mostly endearing but occasionally icky truths about animals.