BLUEBONNET GIRL
Michael Lind, , illus. by Kate Kiesler. . Holt, $16.95 (40pp) ISBN 978-0-8050-6573-2
Lind makes his children's book debut with an uneven verse rendition of a familiar Comanche legend. When the People suffer a drought, the old warrior Spirit Talker divines that the People are being punished for greed and that each must sacrifice his most cherished possession. Only a young girl is willing to give up her private treasure—a doll that wears a bonnet of blue jay feathers—and her selflessness is rewarded when the rains yield fields and fields of bluebonnet flowers the next morning. The storytelling is imaginative and probing: rather than judging the characters, readers will sympathize with the warrior who, prizing his bird-bone vest, waits for someone else to sacrifice first ("When others act, then I will join the rest"); the woman who treasures her beaded moccasins; Spirit Talker who can't relinquish his pipe; etc. But the enjambment and the rhymes are often stilted: "The morning glowed. The child awoke/ to hear the folk/ exclaiming all around. The girl/ stretched to unfurl/ the tepee flap." Kiesler's (
Reviewed on: 03/31/2003
Genre: Children's