BRIAN JACQUES.

BRIAN JACQUES. Brian Jacques has died. Here is an obituary by Margalit Fox from the New York Times (February 9). Jacques wrote the Redwall series (over 20 million copies sold). Annalisa and Nick were huge fans of the books when they were young. Redwall Abbey is a medieval abbey where small animals take shelter from villainous predatory animals. Jacques believed that the characters in his books should be either “goodies” or “baddies.” Goodies were animals like mice or squirrels; baddies were animals like rats or weasels. In the obituary I was moved by the account of how Jacques became an author. He was in his forties and driving a milk truck. On his route there was a school for the blind, and Jacques volunteered to read to the students once a week. He did not like the books he was reading to them (“too much adolescent angst”) and started to write his own books and read them to the children.