My Friend, the Starfinder

by George Ella Lyon, Stephen Gammell (Illustrator)

Overview

Dazzled,
a little girl listens
to her old neighbor's story
of following a falling star
when he was a boy.

He found it, too.
He put it in her hands.

But that's not all
the starfinder has to tell.

One day something
found him.

It's a story
too good to keep.

See for yourself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416927389
Publisher:	Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books
Publication date:	02/05/2008
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	11.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)
Lexile:	AD540L (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 7 Years

About the Author

George Ella Lyon is the author of Trucks Roll!, Planes Fly!, and Boats Float!, cowritten with her son Benn. Among George Ella’s other books are the ALA Notable All the Water in the World, What Forest Knows, and Time to Fly. A former Kentucky Poet Laureate, she lives with her family in Lexington, Kentucky. Visit her online at GeorgeEllaLyon.com.

Stephen Gammell is the beloved illustrator of more than fifty books for children, including Song and Dance Man by Karen Ackerman, which received the Caldecott Medal, and two Caldecott Honor Books: The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant, Where the Buffaloes Begin by Olaf Baker, and The Secret Science Project That Almost Ate Our School by Judy Sierra. Mr. Gammell lives with his wife, Linda, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Editorial Reviews

Stories and the people who tell them form one of the main themes of much of Lyon's poetic work, and this sumptuously illustrated book, perhaps Gammell's finest, is no exception. The narrator begins conversationally, "Once there was a old man./ I knew him/ when I was no bigger than you are." Working in his distinctive style, Gammell (previously paired with Lyon for Come a Tide) spatters a universe of colors across the page as the child dances with the man, who tells stories on his green porch. "For starters," the girl says, "he told me once/ he saw a star falling." The color illustrations give way to black-and-white paintings that convey an astonishing degree of light. The illustrations morph back into full color as the old man puts the star in the girl's hands-"glassy, blackish green/ like puddles around a coal pile." Lyon never lets readers forget that this is a story they are reading: "Now he couldn't bring home/ the rainbow/ the way he did the star./ But when he told the story/ holding out his hand/ I could feel the colors./ I could see it was true./ And how he would have to tell it/ just like I'm telling you." Text and art are sure to evoke wonder in young readers. Ages 4-7. (Feb.)

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Publishers Weekly

PreS-Gr 2- A story told in evocative free verse and graced with exuberant watercolors. A girl begins her narration when she was "no bigger than you are." She describes an old man who sits "in an old chair/on an old green porch" and tells tales of the time he found a falling star, and when he went for a walk and wound up at the end of the rainbow. The child feels certain that the outlandish stories must all be true. Where the text is restrained, the illustrations fairly holler with light and joy. During each of the Starfinder's stories, the palette begins with hushed expectation in black and white, gradually adding colors until the whole page is glowing. This is not to belie the power of Lyon's spare text-it is only in the tension between the carefully chosen words and vivid pictures that the stories' magic emerges. A lovely collaboration.-Rachael Vilmar, Eastern Shore Regional Library, MD

Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Lyon's sensitive tale, spun from a childhood memory, is doubly ruminative: Its female narrator relates two boyhood reminiscences told her by an elderly neighbor. In the first, as a boy, he follows a falling star far afield. He finds it, "warm and smooth / as an egg straight from the hen." He shows it to the narrator, who "held it tight / trying to feel its journey." The second musing finds the amazed boy drenched with the light pooling at the end of a rainbow. Gammell's characteristic mixed-media pictures fully develop Lyon's themes of cosmic and earthly connection. Planets glimmer throughout, and pentangular star motifs figure in every spread, whether in tree bark, patched clothing or cloud shadows. The elder's boyhood adventures are depicted in a miasma of grays accented with the glowing colors of star and rainbow. Gammell emphasizes the joyous interplay between the narrator (in oversized, peacock-green cap) and her shiny-pated friend by suffusing both with reflected, prismatic light. An author's note fondly commemorates the real starfinder. Lovely. (Picture book. 4-7)

Kirkus Reviews

In this simple story a child is dazzled by the stories of an elderly neighbor: "The stranger they were, the truer he looked. And I believed every one." First, there's the story about the star he saw falling as a child. The starfinder retrieves it and shares it with the child, who reports: "It was warm and smooth as an egg straight from the hen." In another tale, the starfinder gets to the rainbow's end, where he reports that his body was striped with colors. Narrator Julia Gibson does a good job conveying the poetic simplicity of this tale, allowing herself time to emphasize its phrasing and linger over its internal rhymes and rhythms. Young listeners will enjoy a conversation about truth and imagination after the story. J.C.G. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2009 - AudioFile