The Gift Stone

Jean lives in Coober Pedy, an underground mining town in the Australian Outback where her father mines for opals, but Jean yearns for a real home and an opportunity to go to a real school, and when she finds an opal in her house, she is able to afford to go to school at her grandparents' house in Adelaide.

Kindergarten-Grade 3-Coober Pedy, a dusty, Australian opal-mining town, is the setting for this quietly effective story. Jean and her father live in a dwelling built underground where "The walls are rock, streaked rust-orange and white, the doorways are rock, the floors, everything is cool, hard rock." In spite of her love for her dad, the girl longs for a real house with windows, a house surrounded by grass. Her grandparents live in just such a place. Jean describes it as "...like living inside an opal-the biggest, brightest opal there ever was." When Grandma sells an opal that Jean gave her and uses the proceeds to pay for the expenses of having her granddaughter move in, she says, "The opal was a lovely present...but having you here will be an even better present for me." Serious, realistic paintings are well suited to the understated yet evocative text. Each page has a solid brown background, re-creating the confinement and dust of Coober Pedy, but the illustrations depicting outdoor scenes are filled with light. Each painting captures a precise moment in time, making the whole book look like a series of stills. The Australian terminology is minimal and creates no barrier to comprehension. A child's wistful longing unexpectedly fulfilled comes through plain and clear in this lovely offering.
Faith Brautigam, Gail Borden Public Library, Elgin, IL
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In this sentimental tale, an opal miner's daughter finds a precious gem that grants her wish. "This town is dust and rock and digging machines and sky. Come, I'll show you where we live... underground," narrator Jean begins. In the Australian mining town of Coober Pedy, Jean and her father do indeed live beneath the earth in a dark, rock-lined dwelling, a dimly lit life subtly underscored by the book's brown pages. From this earth-colored backdrop emerge Garns's (Gonna Sing My Head Off!) soft pastel images of life above ground, where Jean sifts through rock piles for shiny bits of opal that the miners have missed. Staring into one such shard, she sees "colors you don't see anywhere else in Coober Pedy. It's like all the bright green and purple and red that we ought to have out here got trapped inside rock." She connects these colors to those outside the window at her grandparents' snug home in nearby Adelaide and wishes they could afford to board her there. Jean's dream is realized after she discovers an opal imbedded in the wall of her aunt's underground house (they are miners, too). While Eversole (Flood Fish) builds some interesting details about this unorthodox lifestyle, she doesn't develop the relationships among the characters. Because readers see little of Jean's interaction with her grandparents, they may well question how she could so easily leave her father behind, even considering her dreary surroundings. Garns's pastels capably portray the narrator but they, too, rarely show Jean interacting with others. In the end, Jean seems as isolated above ground as she did beneath it. Ages 5-8.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ages 5^-8. Jean wanted to stay behind with her grandparents, but her dad told her she couldn't because her grandparents didn't have enough money to provide for a growing girl. Instead, Jean and her father go to live in an opal-mining town in South Australia. While her dad is mining, Jean sifts through rock piles, dreaming of finding an opal large enough to get them out of their underground house and their lonely world. Jean's dream comes true, but instead of selling the opal, she saves it as a gift for her grandmother. Her generosity is rewarded when her grandmother uses the opal to buy schoolbooks, clothes, and a spare bed for Jean. The darkness and isolation of the book's unusual setting are nicely expressed in both words and pictures. Garns' beautifully rendered oil pastels, set against a backdrop of reddish brown that calls up the color of the earth, do a particularly nice job of visually conveying a feeling of life underground. Lauren Peterson