Star Stuff

Giovanni the farmer and his donkey, Lorenzo, are “Specialists in Sky Repair” in this celestial story that features constellations coming to the rescue. Through lightly rhyming lines by Burkert, Giovanni and Lorenzo are described roaming the cosmos, looking for holes and filling them from a basket of “star stuff.” When Lorenzo gets his foot stuck in a nebula (“Swirls of dust and plumes of gas”), the donkey can’t escape until friendly, blue-hued constellations—Orion the Hunter, Cancer the Crab, and Taurus the Bull—appear one by one, cooperating to pull the donkey free. With a bold brush, bright colors, and rounded, friendly looking figures, Raschka mixes warm-hued elements, including pale-skinned Giovanni’s feathered Tyrolean hat and Lorenzo’s red bridle, with blue-lit constellations to create an unexpected collision of the rustic and the interstellar. Rather than writing about them as scientific phenomena, Burkert personifies astral entities as old friends in this folktale-flavored turn on the intergalactic. Ages 4–8. (Oct.)