Overview
Napí is a young Mazateca girl who lives with her family in a village on the bank of a river in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Each afternoon the family sits beneath the shade of a huge ceiba tree and listens to the grandfather's stories. As Napí listens, she imagines different colors — orange, purple, violet, and green. When night comes, the trees fill with white herons settling on their branches. The ceiba tree sends Napí dreams every night, and in her favorite one, she becomes a heron, gliding freely along the river. Domi's vibrant palette and magical illustrations perfectly complement this imaginative story.
Synopsis
Napí is a young Mazateca girl who lives with her family in a village on the bank of a river in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Each afternoon the family sits beneath the shade of a huge ceiba tree and listens to the grandfather's stories. As Napí listens, she imagines different colors — orange, purple, violet, and green. When night comes, the trees fill with white herons settling on their branches. The ceiba tree sends Napí dreams every night, and in her favorite one, she becomes a heron, gliding freely along the river. Domi's vibrant palette and magical illustrations perfectly complement this imaginative story.
Ken Marantz and Sylvia Marantz - Children's Literature
Napi invites us into her life on the riverbank in Oaxaca to listen to her grandfather's stories under the ceiba tree they call pachot, and to watch the colors of the day flow into the night. Then we join her in her dreams, as she becomes a heron flying over the river and the village. The story is rich with Napi's emotions vividly reflected on double pages of watery acrylic paintings. There is a sophisticated innocence about the illustrations that are reminiscent of some by Paul Klee, a way of totally filling the pages with areas of colors, symbols of plants and animals, buildings created with multicolored stripes, child-like representations of people, and moons with faces. The dream-like sequences are imbued with the spirit of a colorful culture, the Mazatecas, who may be poor but are rich in imagination. 2004, Groundwood Books/Douglas & McIntyre, Ages 5 to 8.
Editorials
Children's Literature
Napi invites us into her life on the riverbank in Oaxaca to listen to her grandfather's stories under the ceiba tree they call pachot, and to watch the colors of the day flow into the night. Then we join her in her dreams, as she becomes a heron flying over the river and the village. The story is rich with Napi's emotions vividly reflected on double pages of watery acrylic paintings. There is a sophisticated innocence about the illustrations that are reminiscent of some by Paul Klee, a way of totally filling the pages with areas of colors, symbols of plants and animals, buildings created with multicolored stripes, child-like representations of people, and moons with faces. The dream-like sequences are imbued with the spirit of a colorful culture, the Mazatecas, who may be poor but are rich in imagination. 2004, Groundwood Books/Douglas & McIntyre, Ages 5 to 8.—Ken Marantz and Sylvia Marantz