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After finally having read David Almond's 1998 Carnegie Medal winning young adult novel Skellig, as an adult reader, the combination of angel/human/bird like nature of the creature encountered in Skellig and how he is helped and nursed back to health by two ten year old children, by main protagonist Michael and his homeschooled and poet William Blake obsessed friend Mina, well, with Skellig's rank breath, atrocious body odours, strange taste for insects, dead mice, Chinese takeout, brown ale etc., the story superficially kind of reminds me a bit of the 1938 crime drama movie Angels with Dirty Faces (starring James Cagney) and that I am also left wondering if Almond naming his Skellig character after an island off the coast of Ireland (Skellig Michael, and that the island is in fact named after the Biblical archangel Michael) is supposed to signify that in Skellig main character Michael and Skellig are strongly and forever linked and that not only Skellig but also Michael (and by extension of course) also Mina are required to help Michael's dangerously ill and on the verge of death infant sister Joy get better, for her heart surgery to be successful.

For indeed, while many of the physical character descriptions David Almond textually provides in Skellig show Skellig as being majorly non angelic and dirty faced on the outside (at least in the Biblical sense or perhaps more to the point if one considers how angels have generally been depicted in European art, literature and culture over the centuries), internally, Skellig really is shown by Almond to posses a heart of pure gold, since definitely and ALL descriptions of physical decrepitude in Skellig notwithstanding, Skellig is totally and utterly a healer and a shiningly, glowing and loving, caring individual. And yes, even though David Almond never does let his readers know exactly and precisely who or what Skellig is meant to be, well for me and in my personal opinion, everything internal to Skellig shines so very warmly, so sparklingly brightly, that his, that Skellig's soul is what I personally would definitely consider as being that of a Biblical angel figure and in the most positive and totally not judgmental and non punishing sense of the word, only ever caring, healing and showing appreciation, that Skellig concluding with the sweetly delightful and in my opinion bordering on the miraculous successful heart surgery for Michael's baby sister is caused primarily by love, love and more love (but also that said love is actually only partially emanating from Skellig to Joy, that Skellig's angelic soul helping Joy get well also would never have been able to happen without Michael and Mina's first caring for and helping Skellig become well and strong, and that love and caring is what makes the world go round and also causes miracles, that basically, in Skellig, it is not just Skellig who creates Joy's deliverance, but that Michael and Mina helping and feeding Skellig, that the doctors and nurses at the hospital, as well as Michael and Joy's parents, that this all comes together for Baby Joy.

And while it did take me a while to get into Skellig and that I at first found David Almond's depictions of Skellig a bit over the top so to speak with regard to being physically grotesque, after about fifty or so pages, I had both gotten used to Almond's writing style and I was was able to appreciate not only its textual brilliance but to absolutely and totally enjoy Skellig and how Skellig's physical appearance in no way mirrors him inside, that Michael and Mia's support of and caring for Skellig totally frees the latter's internal shiningness and helps Baby Joy survive (so that my final rating for Skellig is not the three stars I was thinking of at the beginning of the novel but definitely and appreciatively five stars, but that I do wonder about reading the prequel, as while part of me wants more details on Mina, I am kind of worrying that this might negatively affect my positive memories of Skellig).