The Love Flute

In love with a beautiful girl, but too shy to tell her, a young man leaves his camp in frustration. One night he receives mystical visitors who offer him a special gift — a love flute. A gift from the birds and animals, its tells the girl of his love where words have failed.

A gift to a shy young man from the birds and animals helps him to express his love to a beautiful girl.

In love with a beautiful girl, but too shy to tell her, a young man leaves his camp in frustration. One night he receives mystical visitors who offer him a special gift — a love flute. A gift from the birds and animals, its tells the girl of his love where words have failed.

Publishers Weekly

Traditionally, the Native American man would use a ``love flute'' to woo the woman he loved, to speak to her of things that words alone could never express. In this lyrical tale, a young man too timid to profess his love is presented with such a flute by two mysterious Elk men. Goble writes with a poetic energy, a graceful enthusiasm of ``love songs carried by the breezes into the tipi circle from the surrounding pine-covered ridges and grassy hills.'' Striking illustrations in bold blocks of color are set against flowers alive with birds and butterflies. There is a pleasing simplicity to the artwork, an inherent sense of order in the pristine images. Imbued with warmth and spirit, each page seems to dance with movement and color, as if to the flute's beguiling music. Intricate black-and-white sketches of various love flutes on each page enhance this prepossessing work. All ages. (Sept.)

Paul Goble has received wide acclaim for his magnificent books, including Buffalo Woman, Dream Wolf, Her Seven Brothers, and the winner of the 1979 Caldecott Medal, The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses. Commenting on his work in Beyond the Ridge, Horn Book Magazine said, "striking elements synthesize the graphics with the narrative and spiritual aspects of the text." The New York Times Book Review noted that his technique is "a marriage of authentic design and contemporary artistry, and it succeeds beautifully."

Paul Goble's most recent book for Bradbury Press, I Sing for the Animals, was called "a lovely, small book that movingly conveys profound belief in the goodness of creation" by Kirkus Reviews, and School Library Journal said it "fits as easily in the hand as Goble's meditations about the natural world do in the heart."