It Rained on the Desert Today (Reading Rainbow Book) - Hardcover

Rising Moon Editors

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0873585755 ISBN 13: 9780873585750

Publisher: Cooper Square Publishing Llc, 1994

Synopsis

After months of hot, dry weather rain finally comes to the desert

About this title

From School Library Journal:

Grade 2-5-In free-verse text that builds to a crescendo and then diminishes to the calm of a clean summer night, the Buchanans describe the coming of a welcomed storm to the Southwestern desert. Tracy's watercolor paintings fill one side of each double-page spread, and a tiny painting placed next to the text on each opposing page provides balance while highlighting a plant, a creature, or an aspect of the scene. The paintings feature dark values washed with vivid color and bright flashes of light from sun, lightning, moon, or stars. The overall effect is one of warmth and delight in the rejuvenating power the rains bring. Readers might compare the images evoked here with those in books by Byrd Baylor and Peter Parnall, such as Desert Voices (Scribners, 1981). It might also be used to contrast with Mary Stolz and Pat Cummings's Storm in the Night (HarperCollins, 1988). A quiet but effective regional slice of life.
Barbara Chatton, College of Education, University of Wyoming, Laramie
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

The drama of seasonal change quickens a girl's first-person account of the first summer rain in the Southwestern desert. The narrator's elation at the storm expands in Tracy's satisfying visual studies of the responses of animals, people and sun-scorched landscape. Startling if occasionally forced perspectives evoke the grandeur of the storm and its power to renew life in seemingly barren surroundings. In one charming sequence, toddlers romp in the downpour until "they look like mud babies born from the earth herself." The furious rain dwindles to a rainbow, then cedes to a fiery, quiescent sunset. There is, however, a ragged quality about the book. Small motifs amplifying the narrative and appearing opposite full-page illustrations seem superfluous, and the text sometimes distracts by pulling readers into a perception of rhythm only to push them into prose. Ages 4-up.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cooper Square Publishing Llc
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0873585755
• ISBN 13: 9780873585750
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32