Potter Come Fly to the First of the Earth

Grief-stricken over a friend's drowning, Potter is visited by a bird who flies with him on a life-changing journey that helps him come to terms with sorrow and death.

Grade 4 Up Potter's best friend has just drowned, and Potter is not only bereft but terribly sick with his annual unstoppable cough. He vents his anger and grief on a Baltimore Oriole pecking frantically at his window by hitting it with his baseball. Appalled by his own cruelty, he rushes out in the rain to save it, intensifying his illness but establishing a bond between himself and the bird. While Potter lies coughing and fevered, the mysterious Oriole draws his soul out of his body and transforms it into a dove "to learn the holy things of God." They soar forth to enjoy the beauty of the Earth and to watch the painful death of the Phoenix, followed by its glorious resurrection. Thus Potter understands at last the hope of life after death. Interwoven with these mystical, out-of-body experiences is the growing expression of love Potter feels flowing from his taciturn father during the crisis of the boy's illness. Love, both divine and human, is the core of the story. Unlike the child in At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald, Potter does not die but returns to his body and his parents. Potter is written in a lush, poetic, pictorially vivid style and moves quickly; it is illustrated with many full-page, realistic color illustrations. As in Wangerin's The Book of the Dun Cow (Harper , 1978), the vocabulary, sentence length and subject matter call for good reading skills. Pat Pearl, First Presbyterian Church Library, Martinsville, Va.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.