How the Stars Fell into the Sky by Jerrie Oughton

Then there's a picture of a boy on a beach, his pockets bulging with driftwood and colorful shells, looking frustrated that his pockets won't hold the rest of his beachcombing treasures, which lie tantalizingly before him on the sand.

His feet are visible, but it's not clear whether he's floating in the deep end or standing in the shallow. The line “I wish you more tippy-toes than deep” accompanies a picture of a boy happily swimming in a pool. It starts out simply enough: two children run pell-mell across an open field, one holding a high-flying kite with the line “I wish you more ups than downs.” But on subsequent pages, some of the analogous concepts are confusing or ambiguous. 5-9)Ī collection of parental wishes for a child. The song, based on a Xhosa lullaby, still has that hard-to-resist sing-along potential, and the themes of waging peace, collective action, and the benefits of sound ecological practices are presented in ways that children will both appreciate and enjoy. Seeger sums it up in a postscript: “every community must learn to manage its giants.” Hays, who illustrated the original (1986), creates colorful, if unfinished-looking, scenes featuring a notably multicultural human cast and a towering Cubist fantasy of a giant.

How to avoid Abiyoyo’s destruction now? Sing the monster to sleep, then make it a peaceful, tree-planting member of the community, of course. But the rock that Abiyoyo obligingly flings aside smashes the wand. Call on Abiyoyo, suggests the granddaughter of the man with the magic wand, then just “Zoop Zoop” him away again. Faced with yearly floods and droughts since they’ve cut down all their trees, the townsfolk decide to build a dam-but the project is stymied by a boulder that is too huge to move. The seemingly ageless Seeger brings back his renowned giant for another go in a tuneful tale that, like the art, is a bit sketchy, but chockful of worthy messages. Powerful and pleasingly enigmatic in Oughton's lyrical, compact retelling, the tale is well served by Desimini's handsomely designed illustrations featuring biomorphic forms-the land itself seems as organic as the human figures-and the glowering rusts and blues that are becoming her trademark. Testy and imperious, Spider Woman isn't patient with their questions, so even when the lesson is complete the women don't understand, at first, what they have learned. The unsourced tale tells how two women, concerned for their cold and hungry people since ``Even when winter had come and gone, it stayed winter in their hearts because the white wolf of fear crept among them,'' encounter Spider Woman, who pulls them into her land near the sky, makes a giant loom, and shows them how to prepare wool, gather colors from all creation, and weave with reverence as well as skill (``Weave with your very souls and be sure to bind each end of the rug carefully''). A second Navajo myth from the team that collaborated on How the Stars Fell into the Sky (1992).

How the Stars Fell into the Sky by Jerrie Oughton