When Birds Could Talk & Bats Could Sing - Softcover

Virginia Hamilton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0590473735 ISBN 13: 9780590473736

Publisher: Scholastic, 1999

Synopsis

Based on African-American folktales told in the South during the plantation era, a collection of stories originally gathered by journalist Martha Young pays tribute to the human spirit in the face of terrible hardship.

About this title

About the Author

BARRY MOSER is the prize-winning illustrator of many beautiful books for children and adults, including Harcourt’s Telling Time with Big Mama Cat and Sit, Truman!, both co-illustrated by his daughter Cara Moser and written by Dan Harper. He has won the American Book Award and earned accolades from the American Library Association and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Mr. Moser lives in western Massachusetts. TONY JOHNSTON’s numerous books for children include It’s About Dogs, illustrated by Ted Rand, Very Scary, illustrated by Douglas Florian, and The Day of the Dead, illustrated by Jeanette Winter. She lives with her family in California.

From Publishers Weekly

With impressive aplomb, Hamilton follows the ambitious Her Stories with eight animal tales, reworked from 19th-century originals recorded by a slave owner's daughter. The stories are told in the cante fable tradition, with plenty of rhyming and singing, and an apparently artless ease ("Well, Miss Mockingbird reeled the song off as pretty as you please"). They must be read aloud. And they will be-the foibles, squabblings and occasional good deeds of Miss Bat, Bruh Buzzard and Sis Wren are our own. The self-deceived Miss Bat's two stories epitomize the book. She shakes loose all her beautiful feathers, then casts away all her songs, so that she will not be like any bird... and soon she most certainly is not. The reader will laugh, ruefully, at her pride, recognizing the moral ("For pride has a way of taking a fall every time") long before it appears as the satisfying conclusion. A wonderful complement to the front-porch voice of the stories, Moser's bright watercolors vibrate with dozens of birds confronting the reader in their best hats and bonnets, their faces alive with contentment, irritation or panic. These vaguely Disneyesque characters strut through formal full-page compositions and flutter, flounce and perch among the lines of type. It's unusually warm and down-to-earth work for Moser, some of his best, and helps to make this book, if not the most serious of Hamilton's collections, one of her most enjoyable and accessible. All ages.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scholastic
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0590473735
• ISBN 13: 9780590473736
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 63
• Illustrator: Barry Moser