How Night Came from the Sea: A Story from Brazil

In sure-footed prose brushed with delicate poetry, Gerson retells a Brazilian story of how night was brought to earth from the sea. Before the arrival of darkness there was ``only sunlight and brightness and heat.'' When a daughter of African goddess Iemanja leaves her ocean home to marry ``a son of the earth people,'' she sorely misses the cool cover of darkness, the shady mantle of dusk. Only a bag of night from her mother's kingdom can restore her happiness, and soon the earth people come to know the beauty of night. In her vivid narrative Gerson paints the welcome approach of darkness with such feeling that the perfume of night flowers seems to hover in the air. Golembe's (illustrator of Gerson's Why the Sky Is Far Away ) monotypes use brilliant colors to present an exotic landscape, a dramatic backdrop for her jet-black figures endowed with the nobility of gods. The underlying calm of these outwardly exuberant compositions gracefully reflects the story's movement from lightness to the coming of night. Ages 4-8. (Sept.)