Synopsis
How the Moon Regained Her Shape is a fiction picture book for children. Janet Ruth Heller has written a legend influenced by Native American folktales that explains why the moon changes shape and helps children deal with bullies. The sun insults the moon, and the moon feels so badly hurt that she shrinks and leaves the sky. The moon turns to her comet friend and her many friends on earth to comfort her. Her friends include rabbits and Native Americans. Then she regains her full shape, happiness, and self-esteem, and she returns to her orbit. An educational appendix gives advice about bullying, scientific information about the moon, and ideas for related activities for children.
This book has won four national awards for its lyrical writing and its wonderful artwork. Illustrator Ben Hodson won a Benjamin Franklin Award for this book's artwork in 2007. How the Moon Regained Her Shape also won a Book Sense Pick (2006), a Children's Choices award (2007), and a Gold Medal in the Moonbeam Children's Book Awards (2007). The book was also a finalist for the Oregon Reading Association's 2009 Patricia Gallagher Picture Book Award.
Children will learn from this book 1) that they need to tell friends and adults when bullying occurs, 2) that a bully's insults are seldom true, 3) that children will recover from abuse, and 4) that we can be friends with people who are different from us. Bullying thrives in secrecy, and most kids feel intimidated by abuse. Adults will learn that many children need the help and advice of friends and adults to stop bullying and to recover from the loss of trust and self-esteem that such harassment causes.
About the Author
Janet Ruth Heller has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. She is a past president of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, and she is currently president of the Michigan College English Association.
Anaphora Literary Press published her poetry book Folk Concert: Changing Times (2012). Finishing Line Press published her poetry chapbook Traffic Stop (2011). She has published book reviews in Theatre Journal, Library Journal, and The Library Quarterly. Her poetry and stories have appeared in many journals, including Anima, Frogpond, Midstream, The Minnesota Review, Kentucky Poetry Review, Lilith, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Agada, Women and Language, The San Fernando Poetry Journal, Organic Gardening, The Writer, Women: A Journal of Liberation, Earth's Daughters, Mothers Today, and Modern Maturity. Her poems have also been published in the anthologies Our Mothers' Daughters (1979), Light Year ʼ85, Women's Glib: A Collection of Women's Humor (1991), Modern Poems on the Bible (1994), Women's Spirituality, Women's Lives (1995), Pandemonium or Life with Kids (1995), I Killed June Cleaver (1999), Women's Encounters with the Mental Health Establishment (2002), and Recipes for Readers from Michigan's Authors and Illustrators (2009).
She is a founding mother and former editor of Primavera, a literary magazine. Primavera has won awards from Chicago Women in Publishing and the Illinois Arts Council and grants from CCLM and the NEA.
The University of Missouri Press published her scholarly book Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama (1990). Her creative nonfiction "Returning to Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin" appeared in Midwestern Miscellany (2008). Her play The Cell Phone won fourth place in a national contest and was performed at the Fenton Village Players One Act Play Festival in Fenton, Michigan (2011).
Janet's hobbies are hiking, singing, and birdwatching.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
