Skip to main content

Starry River of the Sky

By

Starry River of the Sky
by Grace Lin
Little, Brown, 2012.  288 pgs.  Fiction

       When Rendi is discovered as a stowaway on a wine merchant's cart, he is ignominiously dumped in the Village of Clear Sky, where he gets a job doing chores for Mr. Chao, in innkeeper. Though we don't know where Rendi has run away from, it is clear that he thinks himself too good for his new employment but he soldiers on, having no other choice. What troubles Rendi even more is that the moon is missing from the sky and he alone hears the moaning and sorrowing of a lost soul every night--is it the moon itself? As Rendi teases Peiyi, Mr. Chao's young daughter, worries about Mr. Chan, who can't tell the difference between a toad and a rabbit, and tries to solve the problem of the snail infestation that keeps Mr. Chao at odds with Widow Yan, he starts to feel at home. And when Madame Yang arrives as a guest of the inn, she tells stories that enlighten everyone and then requires stories of Rendi that help him understand himself and bring the moon back to the sky and the rain back to the earth.  A companion volume to Lin's Newbery Honor winning Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Starry  River of the Sky is filled with the same richness of character, folklore, and culture that characterized the first book and the storytelling is even better. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall

By
A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall By Jasmine Warga New York: Harper, 2024. Fiction. 211 pages. A painting has been stolen from the Penelope L. Brooks Museum and sixth-grader Rami Ahmed is worried he's the main suspect. His mother works at the museum as the lead custodian and Rami spends a lot of time hanging out at the museum while she works. On the day the painting went missing, the only people there were the security guard Ed, the cleaning crew, and Rami. Then, a mysterious girl appears in the museum. She floats around from room to room and only Rami can see her -- and she looks exactly like the girl from the missing painting. To prove his innocence and help figure out who the floating girl is, Rami partners up with an aspiring sleuth at school named Veda and the two dive into unexpected situations as they try to solve the mystery. This is a cozy mystery that is focused mostly on characters and ambiance and only a little on the mystery itself. Don't read this book if yo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Amazing Generation

By
The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World Written by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price  Illustrated by Cynthia Yuan Cheng New York: Rocky Pond Books, 2025. Informational. 226 pages.  In a kid-friendly adaptation of his best-selling book, The Anxious Generation , Jonathan Haidt teams up with Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone , to bring the power of good information directly to the hands of those that this issue affects most directly — kids on the cusp of getting their own smartphones. The book presents information about the drawbacks of having a smartphone and social media too soon in clear and easy-to-understand language, with eye-catching graphics and pop-outs. Throughout the book, quotes from real teens and young adults, called screen "rebels" by the authors, emphasize the points the authors are trying to make. Fictional characters are featured throughout in a graphic novel story, which further emphasizes the po...
Post a Comment
Read more