I’ve always been drawn to stories about underdogs who get swept into situations far beyond their abilities. The only way out is through, which usually means failing forward and depending on each other until something like a family forms. The Minions are perfect examples of that kind of misfit energy, and I encountered something similar when I first read The Sheep Detectives . At its core, it’s a mystery: a group of sheep try to solve the murder of their beloved shepherd. They are completely without a clue, literally, about how totally unequipped they are for it. That’s right up my street. But what moved me about this particular group of misfits went far beyond the external stakes. It was how unprepared they were to overcome the internal stakes of processing the grief of losing somebody without erasing them from memory–a feeling that I had some firsthand experience with. I was 23 when my mother died. It was sudden. Life was moving along as usual and then a week later, she was gone.…