Emman ja Eetun yllätyslöytö was written by Marita Hauhia and illustrated by Anne Randén. It was a diglot with Arabic translation. The story is about a girl and a boy (Emma and Eetu) and their surprising discovery: they find an injured seagull. The text was in simple Finnish and words that I could not recognize immediately were easily discernible from the illustrations. I must say though that the author used many verbs that I needed a dictionary for. This would not be a problem for a young Finn, but lennähtää ( = to fly, as in a door flies open) was not in my immediate vocabulary. (I still looked all the verbs up anyway in my dictionary.)
In this story it is a bird that has a disability, not a person. The children, with the help of their older brother Arttu and his girlfriend Anni, care for the injured bird by bringing it home in a basket. The bird is named Siipi ( = Wing). They nurse it back to health and Emma even dons angel wings in order to entice Siipi to fly. The story has a touching ending when they have to let Siipi go. Emma, Eetu and their father row their boat out to sea and take Siipi along. Siipi walks to the tip of the bow and stands there hesitantly. Then the gull takes off, and joins others at sea. Emma yells out:
“Sen täytyy olla meidän Siipi.”
= “You’ll always be our Siipi.”
and Eetu says, after Siipi flies over to them:
“Se on tullut näyttämään,
että se pärjää.”
= “[He] came to show us
that [he] was okay.”
The Finnish language does not differentiate the sexes with its third-person singular pronoun. We do not know if Siipi is a cock or a hen.
The text was presented as displayed on the back cover:
It translates as:
“One summer day,
when Emma, Eetu and Arttu
were on a trip to the beach,
the bulrushes started to move back and forth.
Within the reeds they found a young seagull.
Its wing had been injured
and it couldn’t fly.
Emma and Eetu decided to take care of this little bird.
“When it came time to go back home,
the seagull didn’t want to stay at the beach all by itself.
So what were they going to do?
“Emma and Eetu’s Surprising Discovery is
an easy-to-read book, which will appeal to all children
as a picture book as well as a storybook
and for those who have just learned to read.”